Vivien Roubaud

Temps suspendu

For this solo exhibition, Vivien Roubaud takes over Le Pavillon, a centre for art and technological experimentation, to unfold a dialogue where technique and poetry intertwine. Repurposed objects, disrupted flows, invisible phenomena : everything seeks balance without ever settling. The exhibition brings together a series of installations: motors, sensors, hybrid structures, assembled like elements of a language shaped by glitches, breakdowns and irregular rhythms.

Roubaud explores the margins of technology, where machines cease to be useful and begin to show their vulnerability, their hesitation. Far from any logic of efficiency, his installations falter and wear down. They reveal latent gestures, suspended states, and barely perceptible pulses. Freed from their intended functions, these cyclic, autonomous or misaligned mechanisms, and gestures detached from purpose, propose other ways of ​“world-making”. By disrupting productive dynamics, a visual politics begins to emerge where function fails, our assumptions about what it means to produce begin to shift.

Upon entering, three printer heads mounted on stands draw looping texts onto large sheets spread across the floor. These stripped-down machines, The Creepers, print in circles week after week, like a freewheeling printshop, gradually building up marks on the Pavilion’s walls. Beneath the dome, gold survival blankets drift in the air, held aloft by counteracting airflows. Nearby, a cloud quietly weeps as it evaporates. Objects stir in transparent liquids, while Feux d’artifice, gel de pétrole dégazé, combustion incomplète, tube PMMA seem frozen in time. The Samares Stationnaires AEC hover in fragile equilibrium, ready to tilt with the slightest breath. In the lower level, the Gonflables host old chandeliers that slowly rotate, aimlessly. Écailles, nickel, titane, cuivre, verre, douze volts subtly disturb the tempo, offering alternative rhythms.

The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of delicate moments to be passed through rather than simply viewed. Wonder arises without spectacle: in the drift of a sheet, the hum of a motor, the pause between gestures. The Pavilion becomes a space of technological indiscipline, a porous site where Roubaud shifts the boundaries between art and engineering, function and fiction, control and release. He affirms an aesthetic of malfunction. Not chaotic but generative, glitching and opening space to propose new forms of attention.