Octave Rimbert-Rivière

Rimbert-Rivière, known for his method of marrying ceramics and new technologies, transforms quotidian and functional items such as cups into a state expressive of morphing digital worlds. Infusion is a performance that forsakes the tactile medium of the already off-center ceramics of the artist. With a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach, the artist flirts with the imaginative and perverse world of advertisements: an enchanted, seductive display, activated by the close-up, glosses layers of the real into the realms of the hyperreal, as a transcendental apparatus sets in to narrate the form and function of an item. Not shying away from this fantastical gaze, Rimbert-Rivière’s performance will inquire further into the stage at which a magnified object becomes a mystified artifact. When does the object move from the everyday to the exceptional? And how has the digital realm further advanced the exceptional to become an everyday affair? Interlaced with an immaterial aura, the ceramic works of the Rimbert-Rivière will this time invite space itself to provide a narrative for them, allowing it to gather, harbor, let go, and change meaning as it territorializes them anew.

Infusion is object-oriented yet forsaking any orthodoxy on the presence of a sculptural object. It is an invitation to be in flux with changing tones, advanced as a live music experience played by Rimbert-Rivière himself, Jonathan Castro and Javier Rodriguez, and with visual programmation by Guillaume Roux. Composing affect will occur on this collaborative night and it will sound out the ebb and flow of a multi-media chimera that dances between essence and expression, through the framing of space and the passing of time.

Born in 1988, Octave Rimbert-Rivière graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in Lyon (FR) in 2013 and from the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam, NL) in 2020. As a sculptor, he looks for a tension between craftsmanship and new technologies. He’s interested in the perversion of design and craft, and how to experiment with a type of directed malfunction of technology to create functional sculptures. Currently he is working in Amsterdam at ISO, a collective studio and exhibition place. His work has been shown internationally in numerous exhibitions including From Transhumance to South Perspectives at Rowing, London (UK), Le secret des moules at Bikini, Lyon (FR), Between Raw Vegetables and Peace Terms at Galerie der HFBK, Hamburg ( DE), Raffineries in Moly Sabata, Sablons (FR) or Brekekex in Treize, Paris, amongst participating in multiple group shows. In 2022 he obtained the Stimuleringsfonds Talent Development research grant and has been selected by the Sandberg Instituut to be part of the Fellowship Program in the Materiality category.