CURA.

There’s a riddle-like character to Clovis Bataille’s art; a foundational mystery on which most of his pieces build. This is perhaps inherent to the gesture of gleaning: one contemplates the encounter with the object as a clue to a wider enigma. Bataille’s practice of navigating the city unfolds like an investigation. It borrows from both the acts of witnessing and tracking down in its incorporation of found items. A list could be made, each work like a piece of evidence, a part of the puzzle in arbitrary order: 1) a found image reframed by grey areas, its passe-partout now placing the focus on a unidentified male subject laying on the ground, shot from two different angles but always faceless; 2) a supermarket receipt hacked by a political inscription criminalizing a fascist State, kept and framed by the artist after buying a bottle of water in a fancy neighborhood of Paris; 3) vertical marks suspiciously covering a wall as if it had been scratched—traces worthy of a crime scene’s BPA (Blood Pattern Analysis), if it weren’t for the sobriety of its colors; 4) a life-size sheet of paper covered with a rectangle, this abstract geometricality imprinting the contours of a missing object: a nameless tombstone, bearing neither words nor dates—that of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, buried amongst fellow celebrities in the narrow alleys of the Montparnasse cemetery and whose silhouette was obtained through frottage.

Ambiguously loaded with both profanation and idolatry, the act of rubbing here resonates as a gesture of remembrance; it points to what could have been a monument—an explicit place of intellectual pilgrimage—but instead chose to dwell in anonymity. Clovis Bataille thus rarely starts from scratch but rather looks at things to keep, save, frame or reframe, cut or amputate. Integrating abandoned fragments from the city, working through principles of wastelessness and safeguarding, his pieces however “never take on the passive appearance of scrap”^[1]—to quote French art historian Pierre Restany’s words about Tumours Personified,^[2] sculptress Alina Szapocznikow’s final works. To rescue; to recompose; to remember; here all operate like urges binding affectiveness with economy, a resistance to oblivion charging each item with the capacity to both testify and inquire. In doing so, Bataille notices what architecture holds of surprises and surveillance; how it camouflages processes of awe and alienations, constraint and control. On the occasion of his personal exhibition Fortschritt, held in Petrine, Paris, in 2023, the artist placed on the walls a series of maps found in an architecture magazine he had picked up from the street, ones disclosing the floorplans of several medical institutions—engaging visitors to read between cartographic lines; to find the discipline hidden within diagrams, a deciphering operation in the form of an escape game, with a maze showing no exit. There’s a sense of play to his way of witnessing, with both critical and recreative potential lying in every material extension or signage: landscapes, parks and sidewalks are granted a provocative elasticity, an invitation to withhold and unlock—like a kid peeping through a manhole towards the underground world and whose picture—taken by Ann Golzen and featured in The Child in the City—Clovis sends me via text message. In the foreword to that same book, British anarchist journalist Colin Ward writes that “the city is an irresistible magnet”^[3] and something of this attraction mechanism seems to be at work in Clovis Bataille’s proxemics; a movement that is above coincidental, a drawing force suggesting reciprocity, as if the object had also found its way to him. Photographs; paperwork; things picked up or dismantled—they’re all imbued with adrenalin and impetus; with the necessity of operating at speed or in disguise “exalting the ephemeral, in the folds of our bodies, in the traces of our passage,”^[4] to quote this time Szapocznikow herself. There’s nothing of the flâneur’s leisurely stroll in Bataille’s practice of dérive. His urban attitude is not that of sartorial sprezzatura, of distracted noticing or distant observation—rather it is one of immediate and haptic contact with his surroundings. Some works even take the form of an embrace—like another series of frottages, this time of burnt-out cars abandoned on the streets after public protests. A softness pervades the patterns of these Rorschach-like imprints. Isn’t there some tenderness in the act of rubbing the city’s remains? Like analog x-rays of motorized carcasses, these pieces highlight Clovis Bataille’s tendency of looking at landscape through its skeletal parts; of understanding buildings as bodies—a viscerality akin to poet Ariana Reines’ description of old Paris and its

Spider coils of stairs
Up the bowels of the buildings
[…]
In light and timpani
Something like great poetry
Turning your midsection to steak
Cooking your blood […]^[5]

 Clovis Bataille’s work unfolds through black-and-white bloodiness; it is never oblivious to the corporeal dimension of urban circulation and individual existence. Perhaps this is best exemplified by an ongoing work that forms both the backbone and temporal counterpoint to the artist’s accumulative pace & taste: Untitled (Fakir) (2020–2025), a series of wooden panels picked up from the streets—some of them used on construction sites, others having been placed on window shops as protection during demonstrations—all resized to the same format and later covered by the needles Bataille uses to inject himself with insulin on a daily basis. A numberless countdown that pins one day after the next in the form of both portrait and remedy, Untitled (Fakir) draws a continuity between the body’s skin and that of the city; inside & out superimposed, it mixes two gestures of both protection and control. A material archive of collective unrest, it speaks again of discipline, this time self-imposed with mandatory diligence. Wood, silicon, steel here confront one another in a durational and repetitive evocation of flesh—as an unsolved riddle in the form, this time, of another poem.

do the bones
become part
of the marble
and plaster
over time
soften
then harden
again
into bones^[6]