Suspended Time
Precarious Balance
With this solo exhibition, Vivien Roubaud takes over the Pavillon, an art centre and technological experimentation space, to create a dialogue where technology and poetry intertwine. Repurposed objects, disrupted flows, invisible phenomena: everything seeks a point of balance without ever settling on one. The exhibition Temps Suspendu brings together a constellation of installations – motors, sensors, hybrid structures – assembled like fragments of a visual and sonic language.
Roubaud explores the limits of technology, where machines appear hesitant and vulnerable. Far from any logic of efficiency, his installations wear out, stumble and reveal latent gestures, barely perceptible pulsations. In The Creepers – Multifunction printer, ball bearing, controller, recomposed printers clumsily turn on themselves, drawing colourful spirals and letting chance create unexpected visual landscapes. Freed from their assigned function, these repurposed objects offer other ways of making worlds and invite the viewer to (re)consider what it means to produce.
Inflatables, chandeliers, rotating collector, twenty-four volts brings together old chandeliers enclosed in plastic spheres. They spin around in circles, sometimes calmly, sometimes frantically, while Fireworks, degassed petroleum gel, incomplete combustion, PMMA tube freezes the traces of ephemeral energy in a polymerised gel. Under the dome of the Pavilion, Four ropes, brake, motor, survival blanket, forty-eight volts sculpts the air and its density. The clattering, rustling and clanging mingle with their movements, revealing forces usually imperceptible to the naked eye.
In some works, the artist’s fascination with living things is revealed in subtle and delicate movements: butterfly wings animated by shape memory wires in Écailles, nickel, titanium, copper, glass, twelve volts, or in Samare Stationnaire AEC, a maple fruit suspended in a continuous air current.
The exhibition unfolds as a series of unusual moments, where wonder arises from diversion: the fluttering of a tarpaulin, the breath of an engine, a pause between two gestures. In this context, the Pavilion becomes a laboratory of technological indiscipline, a porous space between art and engineering, use and fiction, control and letting go. Vivien Roubaud – Temps Suspendu is an invitation to slow down, to discover an aesthetic of dysfunction that is generative rather than chaotic, to allow oneself to be touched by new forms of attention.
Le Pavillon, Route Merveilleuse, Namur, Belgique
