Étienne Chambaud - Limbo

LIMBO

    Étienne Chambaud - Mulhouse, France, 1980. Lives and works In Paris.

    Limbo, Étienne Chambaud’s fourth solo exhibition at Labor, transforms the gallery into a latent space—an incomplete system defined by thresholds, absences, and unresolved tensions. Combining bronze sculptures, modified found objects, industrial elements, neon lights, algorithms and architectural interventions, the exhibition unfolds through gestures of dispersal, cutting, folding, covering, perforation, and reversal.

    On the gallery floor, the Zebroids (2024) form a herd of small creatures caught in an ontological limbo. These bronze objects are the product of a meticulous process of cutting and folding realist horse sculptures from the nineteenth century. Split yet connected, their bodies inhabit multiple states at once: contained and emancipated, complete and disjointed. These entities seem to reject their conditions—both as domesticated animals and as naturalistic sculptures—unraveling into a feral, untamed state that resists definition.

    All around them, Limbo (2025) scatters hundreds of identical brass plumbing knobs across the gallery’s walls and ceiling, forming the visible components of a hidden system. These industrial elements, acting as both limbs and boundaries, gesture toward an elusive order or function: a concealed infrastructure or a cosmic expanse.

    Mirrors (2025) articulate another ontological tension. Crafted from used taco stand chopping boards covered with aluminum leaf and wall-mounted, the former cutting devices have become optical ones. Preserving and accentuating the knife and bone marks in the wood, their gilded surfaces reveal their past use as negative portraits of cutting gestures and severed bodies while softly modulating the exhibition’s glow and the spectral traces of its visitors.

    Puncturing the gallery wall with a series of circular holes, Pillory (2025) evokes the historical apparatus designed to constrain limbs and expose bodies. These openings function as framing devices, offering partial views of the garden beyond, the exhibition within, or even the observers themselves. They act as negative counterparts to the Mirrors, shifting the focus from reflection to absence, and from materiality to void.

    Operators (Neon Complements) (2025) introduce a written layer of negation. Blue neon apostrophes blink randomly throughout the gallery and extend into the garden. Drawing on mathematical set theory—where the apostrophe denotes the complement of a set, representing all that it is not—these Operators reconfigure objects and spaces as their abstract counterparts. A Mirror, a Pillory or even the building of the gallery itself becomes, in turn, everything it excludes: all that it is not.

    Through its interplay of material transformations, speculative gestures, conceptual inversions and fragmented systems, Étienne Chambaud’s Limbo constructs an environment that holds meaning in suspension. Resisting closure or resolution, and framing objects as multistable thresholds rather than fixed forms, the exhibition evokes a contingent world defined not by certainty but by what is excluded, latent, or yet to emerge.

    Étienne Chambaud explores the relationships between matter, signs, and structures through works that question the limits of perception and knowledge. His practice, rooted in a conceptual approach, moves between sculpture, installation, film, and writing, often appropriating and repurposing objects or systems from natural history, philosophy, and science. His works function as thresholds of transformation, where the boundaries between form and dissolution, meaning and loss, become blurred and reconfigured. As Tristan Garcia notes, “each of his pieces is like the cross-section of a living contradiction”.

    Étienne Chambaud studied at ECAL in Lausanne, Villa Arson in Nice, and the École nationale des Beaux-Arts (ENBA) in Lyon. He holds a PhD from the SACRe program at PSL University, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris.

    His solo exhibitions include Lâme, LaM – Lille Métropole Musée d'art moderne, d'art contemporain et d'art brut, Villeneuve-d'Ascq (2022); Inexistence, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2021); Negative Knots, La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse (2018); Undercuts, Forde, Geneva (2012); The Encored Separation, Art Unlimited, Basel (2011); Counter History of Separation, CIAP, Vassivière (2010); The Sirens’ Stage, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2010); among others.

    Recent group shows include Domain du Muy x Esther Schipper, Le Muy (2024); Icons, Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection, Venise; MACBA, The collection: Time is an Illusion, Collegium, Arévalo (2023); High Spirits, Monopol, Berlin (2023); Stories of Stone, Villa Medici, Rome (2023); Once Upon a Time, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2022); among others.

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