Hugo Deverchère FR, b. 1988

There is no journey without the unknown. We could be sure that there was a land on the other side of the Atlantic, but none of Columbus’ sailors had any idea of the time needed to get there. We can send probes into space, sometimes light years away, but we have only a vague idea of what possibly awaits us. When Hugo Deverchère begins to work, he has adventure stories and images of other possible worlds in mind. We often neglect the role of abstraction in the sciences, which from hypotheses to models also advance through thought experiments; scholars sometimes project themselves into fiction to test their theories.

In his project La Isla de las Siete Ciudades, guided by the legend of a phantom island, the artist observes very specific Spanish biotopes which correspond to many visions of unworldly territories, whether they are cinematic or literary. Focusing on the text as well as on other sets of signs is fundamental in his approach.
With The Crystal and the Blind, he entrusted a machine with the task of synthesizing both archive documents and stories by Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke. By crossing facts and their interpretations, reality and its representations, he questions our understanding of the world. Hugo Deverchère’s installation work puts us at the crossroads of maps and diagrams, of test tubes and sensors measuring different parameters. For the artist, the exhibition is an experience, or rather a laboratory which, between a film set and an incubator, allows visitors to comprehend phenomena beyond them. With Delusion, he makes visible, or rather perceptible, a tornado that he has recreated on a smaller scale.
The Crystal and the Blind, re-enacting Biosphere 2, a private laboratory that worked towards the reproducibility of different terrestrial ecosystems with a view to interplanetary colonisation, invites us to enter a microcosm in which regulated parameters control the growth of bacteria, minerals and plants...

In the way in which novels condense reality, Hugo Deverchère plays with the instruments of science to precipitate it. He literally develops a science fiction where the visitor is led to wander among narrated processes, where the two disciplines interact beyond the literary genre. Space research can thus teach us, before trying to contemplate the worlds among the stars, to look at our own in all its complexities. The instruments he uses do not hide the intentions of conquest behind exploration or the power issues behind knowledge, but reveal themselves in all their ambiguities. It is not as a demiurge that the artist creates microcosms, but as a researcher eager to be able to develop new perspectives. The focal effects that he develops allow us to see the distance in the near, as shown in the video and cyanotypes of the Cosmorama series. By using, for example, a near-infrared capture device that usually enable the observation of the deep skies, he reveals invisible and inaudible elements of the landscape. By sifting through the volcanic and primary forest landscapes, he shows that elsewhere may already be here, that the future may already be in the past. Does Nasa not test its Martian vehicles in this way on completely terrestrial lava deserts ? Geology puts knowledge back into perspective over a long time frame and on a scale where micro and macrocosm meet.

La Isla de las Siete Ciudades allows Hugo Deverchère to go even further with this thinking by crossing images and inventing a fictitious cartography: are we really in Spain or yet into a dream of the New World, are we still in nature reserves or already projected into space visions? Depicted in this way, exploration sends us back to our capacity for wonder. In these landscapes before or after man, we finally manage to look beyond our reach.

Hugo Deverchère, Science and Fiction Trough Storytelling, By Henri Guette