Zaven Paré

A pioneer of robotics in the visual arts, Zaven Paré has for more than twenty years been developing a singular body of work that rejects technical prowess in order to reveal its poetic dimension. His machines always seem on the verge of breaking down, his automata stammer, his devices stop in the middle of a gesture: here the flaw is intrinsic to the work, and it is in this calculated failure that the full force of the proposition lies.

For Mécatronic, Paré explores assemblages of spare parts inspired by Meccano, building mechanical sculptures that owe more to learned tinkering than to triumphant engineering. These objects, halfway between machine and sculpture, between the useful and the useless, between automaton and puppet, question our relationship with machines and the very definition of the living. An exhibition that invites us to rethink the relationship between humans and technical objects, between the creator and their creation.

From 14 January to 20 March. Zaven Paré is an artist-researcher and a pioneer of robotics in the visual arts. His teeming imagination and the pencil stroke behind his first dreams lead him to conceive vulnerable, fragile devices that run counter to digital art and poetically flirt with the idea of breakdown. He thus imagines objects halfway between mechanical sculptures in pieces and installations of machine fragments. From the world of Meccano he borrows the use of spare construction parts, allowing him to assemble optical instruments, mechanical apparatus, and pneumatic and electronic devices. In this exhibition, visitors will encounter, among other things, a choir of 12 whispering children, the relic of a robotic elephant god and 28 car aerials with stage fright. A mechanical cabinet of curiosities that squeaks and moves.