Cacti, hybrids and small everyday objects. This tripartition comes to mind when approaching Hadrien Gérenton's work, like a distant echo of Donna Haraway's collection of articles Des singes, des cyborgs et des femmes. In the superposition, the mnemonic sedimentation of a title is certainly at play, carried away by an insensible slide towards a realm that is no longer that of living beings. Above all, it is the gateway to the same system of thought that irradiates the two bodies of work, however diverse they may be, one in the regime of the written word, the other in the visual. Whether one chooses to call them "non-aligned behaviours" or "objects without nature", the terminology elaborated by Donna Haraway marvellously matches the contours of Hadrien Gérenton's works and the displacement of the boundaries of naturality that they actualise. One only has to look at the cacti in question: standing on a steel base, they seem petrified, transformed into stone; their dark trunks as if emptied of the water we know they contain. Here and there, there are timid outgrowths of deep green, and strange white teeth piercing the envelope of the plant body. But the impression remains: we are already outside the kingdom; and from the first glance, the standard partition of the world between human, animal, vegetable and mineral is disqualified. You have to get close to these cacti, turn around them and try to detect, behind the silence of the mass, the rich uncertainty of the matter. Cut from the wild during trips abroad, the artist selected them for their sculptural and anarchic appearance. Once brought back to the studio, the plants will then be moulded in an aggregate of various materials. More precisely, a metal structure welded to a base is sculpted with polystyrene and expanding foam, partially covered with thin layers of epoxy, and then patinated with water, pigments and washes. The material composition of these erect presences, which is the result of a complex and uncontrollable process, provides a clue: they are a people of hybrids.

In the image of a nature that is also post-human, Hadrien Gérenton's sculptures embody the advent of a new materiality whose original purity could be nothing more than a vague mythological tale. "For the artist, the crossroads between the organic and the chemical, where the abstract parasites the anthropomorphic, are extended by an installation of platforms entitled Landscapes merging platform. Between sculpture and display, the panorama connotes the vocabulary of the studio, with some rooms hosting them in turn, others remaining solitary. In this piece of interior unchanged through the centuries, one might think for a moment that one was seeing one of those domestic compositions so beloved of the Impressionists. However, the hybrid materiality reminds us: each of these installations is animated, inhabited and, so to speak, intensified. The titles of some of the artist's earlier pieces already hinted at this quality, being qualified by a sentiment usually reserved for humans: the shelves were 'guilty'; the cacti 'shameful'; the frames 'innamorate'. This brings to mind the description of the thing formulated by the philosopher Tristan Garcia in Forme et Objet. A Treatise on Things, a reference work for the branch of philosophy described as "Object Oriented Ontology", which seeks precisely to bring about a new description of the world beyond nature and culture. In a paragraph devoted to the "solitude" of things, he writes: "Every thing, conscious, unconscious, physical, symbolic, product of a cognitive activity, of a linguistic activity or piece of matter is alone as a thing, that is to say, insofar as it exists and subsists under everything that can understand it"[1]. In fact, what could be lost in singularity through the blurring of boundaries between genres is regained here within each entity produced by the artist. Each object is individual, radically such, and the holder of a form of knowledge that is no longer universal but situated, unique. Genres have crumbled into a multitude of radical intensities. 

This conception of the world is also the source of a redefinition of what it means to look. From the point of view of the history of art, and not just the history of epistemology, Hadrien Gérenton's research follows a genealogy of archaeologist artists who appeared on the art scene in the mid-2000s. For them, past and future telescope and compose a retro-futuristic archaeology where we contemplate a field of ruins in place of recent modernist history. Among his influences, the artist cites artists who replay modernist sculpture but contaminate it with an external source, a fundamental impurity that immediately parasites any fantasy of a clear line or a finished concept. Thus the malleable materials and agitated forms of hollows and bumps favoured by Esther Klas, Thomas Houseago or Rebecca Warren, or the forms haunted by an iconography of power whose codes are now blurred by Dahn Vo or Valentin Carron. A decade later, ecological changes have led to a radicalisation of these premises: it is no longer only within the field of human achievements, whether it be the heritage of art history or of humans, that temporality is disrupted, but at the level of the entire ecosystem. Rather than a millefeuille of past and future, the temporality that envelops us can now be defined more as a perpetual present. The image of fusion replaces that of accumulation. Hadrien Gérenton is on the side of the young artists who take note of this fusion and attempt to materialise "significantly other" beings - to use once again a terminology dear to Donna Haraway. To see and encounter Hadrien Gérenton's works, sensitive chemical fossils, is to listen to the ordinary differences which, like a magnifying glass, condense the spectrum of radical mutations on the planet. In this ecosystem, a polymer cactus bears witness, through a magnifying glass effect, to the condition of a humanity that has irrevocably entered the Anthropocene era.

[1] Tristan Garcia, Forme et Objet. Un traité des choses, Paris, PUF : 2011, p. 65