Vivien Roubaud - Temps suspendu

With this solo exhibition, Vivien Roubaud takes over Le Pavillon, center for art and technological experimentation, to unfold a dialogue where technique and poetry intertwine. Repurposed objects, disrupted flows, invisible phenomena: everything seeks a point of equilibrium without ever settling. The exhibition brings together a constellation of installations – motors, sensors, hybrid structures – assembled like fragments of a visual and sonic language.

Vivien Roubaud explores the fringes of technology, where machines seem hesitant and vulnerable. Far from a logic of efficiency, his installations falter, stumble, and reveal latent gestures and barely perceptible pulses. In The Creepers - Multifunction Printer, Ball Bearing, Controller, reconfigured printers rotate awkwardly on themselves: the path of colored marks transforms writing into organic spirals, sketching an unexpected visual landscape. The titles of his works almost always enumerate their constituent elements: a protocol highlighting an assembly where every component matters. Freed from their assigned function, these repurposed objects propose other ways of world making and invite the viewer to reconsider what production truly means.

Roubaud’s machines do not strive for efficiency: they consume, breathe, or exhaust themselves. Inflatables, Crystal Chandeliers, Rotating Collector, Twenty-Four Volts brings together old chandeliers enclosed in plastic spheres. They rotate in rhythm – sometimes calm, sometimes frenzied – while Fireworks, Degassed Petroleum Gel, Incomplete Combustion, PMMA Tube captures traces of ephemeral energy in a polymerized gel. Under the Pavillon’s dome, Four Cables, Brake, Motor, Survival Blanket, Forty-Eight Volts sculpts the air and its density. Clicks, rustles, and collisions mingle with their movements, revealing forces ordinarily imperceptible to the naked eye.

A fascination with the living emerges in the subtle, sensitive vibrations of certain works: the butterfly wings animated by shape-memory wires in Scales, Nickel, Titanium, Copper, Glass, Twelve Volts, or a seed in Stationary Samara AEC floating in a continuous airflow, extend the rhythm of nature.

The exhibition unfolds as a series of singular moments where wonder arises through repurposing: in the suspension of an emergency blanket, the breath of a motor, a pause between gestures. Le Pavillon becomes a site 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 engage with an aesthetic of dysfunction that is generative rather than chaotic, and to open ourselves to new forms of perception.