Sculptor on the Edge of the Future
Les Incarnée s
Les Incarnées sont deux sculptures holographiques et sonores nées d’une vision inspirée par le travail de Pierrick SORRIN.
Incarnée
1er Sculpture holographique
h:30 cm – 2024
Incarnée dans la Matière
2ème Sculpture holographique
h:50 cm – 2025
Prospective Paleontology
Prospective paleontology is a discipline that reverses the logic of time: it uses the laws of the evolution of living things not to read the past, but to imagine the forms of life to come. Inspired by the work of Jean-Sébastien Steyer (CNRS/MNHN), Fred Naud applies this approach to his work as a sculptor.
Five mass extinctions have already reconfigured life on Earth. Each one reduced biodiversity to its minimum before life rebounded, more inventive than ever. The Anthropocene is not an end. It is a planetary exposome tipping toward something else.
Tempus Evolutionis Vitae Post Hominum — four prospective paleontological eras: the Plasticene (λ), plastic becomes a source of carbon; the Neo-Carboniferous (φ), atmospheric CO₂ sediments; the Neo-organisms (ψ), life departs from this unknown niche, like a light at the heart of darkness.
Each era is a hypothesis within which sculptural and digital works are embedded.
Tempus Evolutionis Vitae Post Hominum
[λ].Anthropocène
Current planetary exposome
Plastic is invading our oceans, our soils, our food — the toxic exposome of a consumerist civilisation. Yet on the floating fragments, bacteria have already settled and are feeding on it: this is the plastisphere, a real and documented phenomenon. From consuming petroleum to consuming plastic, it is only a small bacterial step. For plastic remains a formidable source of carbon, the elementary building block of all living things. These micro-organisms will rise toward the surface, are already adapting and will colonise this new synthetic world. What is poison will become resource. The oxygen we breathe was, 3.5 billion years ago, the toxic waste of cyanobacteria — plastic will follow the same path.
Lire plus →[ψ].Plasticène
Exposome rich in plastic
In 140,000 years, the Earth will have passed through a sixth evolutionary bottleneck. The organisms most able to metabolise plastic have gained the upper hand — this is the era of the Plasticene. The great transformation of which the living is capable shines in a thousand ways: digestive symbioses between plastiphagous bacteria and complex organisms, food chains built entirely on our synthetic waste. This is the apex of digestive symbioses; some have been able to observe birds that feed exclusively on drifting plastic debris.
Lire plus →[φ].Néo-carboniferous
Exposome rich in Carbon
More than a million years have passed since our era. A great atmospheric sedimentation takes place on the surface of the Earth: all the CO₂ rejected over millennia precipitates and begins to form a dense black layer covering the continents and the ocean floors — this is the Neo-Carboniferous. After the death brought on by the onset of this unique chemical phenomenon, life resumes its expansion, more creative, more inventive, more strange than ever.
Lire plus →[Ω].Néo-organismes
Exposome still unknown
In 800 million years, the CO₂ sedimentation has long been over. The exposome has stabilised. Rock and the living have merged, the boundaries between one and the other difficult to perceive. On the rocky walls of our vestiges, the micro-organisms of the Neo-Carboniferous have evolved over long periods of time to give birth to the Neo-organisms. A true explosion of biodiversity without precedent, new alliances between mineral and organic. From nothing, a grand whole is in the process of creation.
Lire plus →What Am I Talking About?
Humanity is perhaps not the end. It is a stage.
Matter as Language
Self-taught, trained at the crossroads of art, aeronautical sciences, life sciences and technologies, I construct this black carbon matter, dense, captivating, which becomes the visual signature of my work. Inspired by the work of P. Soulages and the evolutionary vision of J.B. de Lamarck, I develop an organic and sculptural aesthetic where the mineral and the living merge.
The Footprint We Leave
Humanity has drawn a line between what is natural and what is artificial. That line is already gone. Five mass extinctions have already reconfigured life on Earth, each one erasing more than 75% of species before life rebounds, more creative than ever. The oxygen we breathe was, 3.5 billion years ago, the toxic waste of cyanobacteria. And if the carbon we reject were to become the fertile ground of the neo-organisms of tomorrow?
Shifting the Time Scale
Through Tempus Evolutionis Vitae Post Hominum, I imagine four future geological eras populated by creatures born of adaptation to their exposomes. In 2023, generative algorithms open a new dimension. In 2025, the Incarnées fuse sculpture, hologram and sound. Digital organisms of the future incarnated in matter and the present. Just like humanity, the digital has incarnated itself to offer itself to the gaze and show us the world differently.
Art & Science Bridge
Denis MICHEL
Docteur en Sédimentologie
Four billion years ago, life on Earth kicked off its long journey. The type of environment where life appeared and the mechanisms behind its emergence remain unknown.
At first, life remained unicellular, then became multicellular, until the Cambrian explosion. From this “zoological Big Bang” that occurred a mere 540 million years ago, there emerged about thirty body plans, or phyla, from which all animal species are derived through the course of biological evolution.
Human beings – an accident of nature, stateless in biodiversity , organisms that are relatively powerful and potentially emancipated – nonetheless remain unfailingly subject to natural mechanisms. We currently are the playthings of a technological evolution where the inner workings have a natural essence, like those of biological evolution.
Artists have the ability to draw inspiration from the countless layers of the past that constitute us all, thus allowing us to see such imaginary spaces through their creations.
Fred Naud is manifestly fascinated by the ever changing story of life on our planet. That is why he chooses carbon, the fundamental ingredient of living things, as the basis of several of his works while combining them with other factors necessary for life: light, water and heat.
From the laboratory of this visionary artist emerge dazzlingly meaningful works, such as his emblematic pedestal table featuring the primordial “soup” – a theoretical setting that once was the darling of scientists, and today still serves as a metaphor in our minds. The inventiveness of this brilliant architect of new worlds is resolutely infinite, like that of living processes and the human spirit.
My Inspirations…
Pierre SOULAGE
Painter < 1919 – 2022 >
« My instrument was not just black, but this secret light that comes from black. »
Jean-Baptiste de LAMARCK
Naturalist < 1744 – 1829 >
« It is not the organs that have given rise to habits; it is the habits that have, over time, constituted the form of the body. »
Pierrick SORRIN
Video Artist < 1960 >
« My artistic approach questions the meaning of existence. But I like it when it’s funny. »
Baptiste MORIZOT
Philosopher < 1983 >
« It is in the moments when nature maltreats us most that we must rediscover trust in the living: its powers of regeneration and resilience. »
Philippe GUILLEMANT
Retired CNRS Research Physicist
< 1958 >
« The future already exists but it is not fixed, as it is modulated in permanence by collective consciousness. »
Jean-Sébatien STEYER
Paleontologist CNRS/MNHN
< 1958 >
« The future belongs to those with the longest memory. »
(quote from Nietzsche claimed as his own)