Nicolas Milhé - Casus belli - 2009
Executive production - Frac Aquitaine
For his exhibition Casus belli , Nicolas Milhé, an “emerging” artist recently noticed on the national scene, presents a collection of works that put art to the test of “zero degree” architecture: a wall - half defensive , half offensive, the aspect of which brings it closer to a loophole - a shelter and a fragment of an underwater base indicate the landmarks of a falsely insurrectionary space. The link with the living species is tenuous, it is rather underlying: if a wild animal is the epicenter of the exhibition, there are signs of human life under a carved rock and, further on, on a photograph, a paradoxical folkloric intrusion. As a counterpoint, an archetypal mountain landscape and a series of constellations (made up of eyecups called "peepholes" and placed on mirrors) recall the framework of operations (terrestrial or celestial), to use a military formula. Through the play of diversion, Nicolas Milhé distils a deliberately caustic spirit; and a “casus belli” (a motive for war) with both murky and universal borders.