PARIS-B is pleased to welcome the artist duo Xolo Cuintle to its PB Project space for their new exhibition, “Sequel to 1450°C.”

Enthusiasts of concrete sculptures, the entity Xolo Cuintle, formed by Romy Texier and Valentin Vie Binet, strives to hybridize references, eras and spatialities. Through their petrified aesthetic, where forms seem frozen by the ashes of Vesuvius, a strange landscape unfolds in the exhibition space; the viewer, faced with this new archaeology, cannot determine whether it leans towards the archaic or the futuristic.

For the duo, everything starts with a script, a scenario, that takes root in the location they invest. The utility of the space, its peculiarities, allow them to develop resonances and provide a starting point for the narrative. In the space of the PB Project, a meta-gallery model of the site resonates with bas-reliefs presented at the 1450°C exhibition at Art-o-rama in 2023.

Similar to sequences or pieces of a storyboard, their vocabulary of grain silos, fields, and corn cobs refers to several climatic events. The storm that hit the Sahara in 2022 and caused clouds of pink sand in Europe; the story of the Dust Bowl, when in the 1930s the public authorities of the American Midwest pushed farmers to overexploit land with new industrial and intensive methods, causing a social and environmental catastrophe; or more broadly, the sight of these fields, yellowed and burned during periods of drought and extreme heat.

The temperature of 1450°C is the one that must be reached to form clinker during the manufacture of cement: a finely ground mixture of limestone, clay, and sand, subjected to the effects of heat and then suddenly cooled. It also corresponds to the sum of temperatures to which a cornfield is exposed before reaching maturity. Two industries linked by the same lexical field – the mill and the silo, the flour and the dust -, two massive, impactful, and polluting productions.

Xolo Cuintle questions a resilient nature and the possibility of breaking cycles, contrary to this lying dog whose figure spans eras and civilizations. It is then a question of what will survive time.

Between fertility or sterility, functional or simulacrum, nature or artifice, the works of Xolo Cuintle unfold like the draft of fiction, as many possible narratives of a world locked in a gray zone of tension.