ABOUT
By Maxence Grugier
Trained at the University of Lyon II and ARFIS Guillaume Marmin is a French visual artist.
His work, connected from the beginning to the music scene and performing arts, is part of a revival of the visual creation by overcoming traditional forms of storytelling and traditional performing media. Influenced by experimental filmmakers such as Len Lye or Stan Brakhage, Guillaume Marmin is looking for a new synaesthetic alphabet, a common language between images and sounds, rhythms, contrast and sleek moving figures.
In order to offer new media on this new language, the work of Guillaume Marmin is taken away from the traditionnal screen to test all types of media: mapping on 3D sculptures and buildings, projection on photography and screen printing, bodies in motion and smoke. His immersive works in public space consisting of collaborations between architects, musicians and lighting designers.
By coordinating the play of light evoking radiation and magnetism, with discrete sounds and signals (clicks, crackling , rattling , vibrations), it creates a world that combines abstract purity with the delicacy of the generative geometry in a set of images both complex and fundamental. His works give body to the intangible, making us momentarily approach the beauty of the unseen and the mathematical foundation of reality.
Despite the use of tools appearing as technologically advanced and the intervention of digital media, his work expresses a desire to not evacuate reality. Whether the earth (Around the island), climatic phenomenom (Après-nous le déluge), architecture ( Raster ) or the history of paradigms in physics (Timée), Guillaume Marmin illustrates all the ambivalence of the present day in its relationship between nature and technology. Around the Island, Timée, Raster… all pieces that avoid the pitfall of an art fully turned to digital and virtual.
As minimalist as it is, the work of Guillaume Marmin does not exclude some kind of transcendental mysticism (Hara). A concern that is found in the way he constantly evokes the beauty of the imperceptible, the law of physics, transposing sounds and digital streams , in a new world of pictures and narrations.