The exhibition Pharmakon presents new works by Antoine Renard, created following his residency at the Villa Médicis in 2019. In Rome, he was able to conduct various researches into scent, conceived as a medium of memory, identity, and the psyche.
Drawing from the cultural heritage of Rome and the Mediterranean, Antoine Renard based his work on ancient and Christian cultures that have a broad experience of scent in their relationship with mysticism, the body, and healing.
This research in Italy was preceded by several trips to the Peruvian Amazon between 2018 and 2020, during which Antoine Renard studied various healing rituals practiced on adolescents and adults with severe addictions.
In that context, he discovered the importance of scents in those therapies, especially for perfumeros, healers who develop olfactory healing practices.
For over ten years, Antoine Renard has been developing unique work in sculpture, installation and video, exploring what lies in the shadows, lurking in the recesses of the subconscious, where he deconstructs and closely examines the mechanics of fear and anxiety, which sometimes permeate our relationship to reality to the point of transgression.
Although he uses the latest technologies and high-tech digital imagery, this is often in order to adulterate them, to twist the way they are used, to push error potential and machine deviance to the limit.
For the exhibition at the Crac Occitanie, Antoine Renard developed a set of works conceived from raw material samplings and empirical observations conducted during his research. Subjected to techno- chemical processes, these materials have been reinterpreted