off-duty seraphim

What if humanity had defeated death? Fewer souls would ascend, and the beings charged with guiding them would lose the very role they were given. Almost every religion and cosmology imagines such guides, watching over the soul between one world and the next. Here they take the name of the seraphim, the highest of the angelic orders, as a convention that reaches beyond any single faith. off-duty seraphim begins with this hypothesis.

Released from their duty, the seraphim come down to the world they once watched from above. They linger in forests and familiar rooms, and bear witness to the intimate and the catastrophic alike. The artist calls the places they visit fixed points, places where one can be at peace, even with the thought of an ending. The angel has stopped performing transcendence, and there is something deeply human in that fatigue. In one work, a seraph wears the habit of the Great Schema, the highest degree of Orthodox monasticism, whose monks devote their lives to imitating the angels. The angel now dresses as those who try to imitate its perfection, and the passage between the human and the celestial becomes an infinite loop.

Two moons often rise together in the sky. Nothing has visibly changed, yet something, somewhere, has shifted.

The exhibition brings together pietra dura panels, tapestries, oil paintings, a bronze high relief and a cabinet-sculpture. Each work begins with artificial intelligence models that aurèce vettier trains on his own archives, and is carried into matter through some of the most demanding métiers d'art: hardstone marquetry, bronze casting, palladium gilding, hand weaving. There is an old word for this kind of transformation: alchemy. One of the most durable materials in art history is asked to hold what cannot last: smoke, clouds, comets, bodies made of light and computer code. In the tapestries, the seraphim meet the figures of the painter Vincent Gicquel, in a forest shared by two bodies of work.

Seen together, the works stop behaving like separate disciplines. They form a constellation, each one a point of light. At its centre stands homecoming, a bronze high relief gilded in palladium, in which a figure crosses a forest towards a mountain that never quite arrives. Five birds sit on a branch that once held one bird more.

Death gives shape to things. It makes time perceptible and lends weight to what comes before it. These seraphim return to the finite because matter has become interesting again, and they leave us with a quiet task: to look again at the world we have.

Claudia Piovan