Welcomed by the artist's paintings, the visitor to the Paul-Valéry museum is also welcomed by a soundtrack that Orsten Groom himself composed, his now famous GLUES (blues, but stickier). Accompanied by its dissonances – we find the imprint of La Monte Young or Stockhausen – finding ourselves face to face with the works, this time pictorial, calls for a work of interpretation where there is no shortage of avenues. Through this Coma Volcano, Orsten Groom returns to a decisive autobiographical event. At the age of twenty, while a student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist suffered a stroke, which left him with amnesia and epilepsy. These evils are transformed, becoming a material, a support for ecstatic crises then finally for his painting. This conversion of epilepsy into creation, not unlike that of Dostoyevsky, took place for him through pictorial media. Because Simon Leibovitz-Grzeszczak tackles large formats, and studies spaces and supports, the transcendence of representations through the most empirical immanence.

Extract from the article by Arthur Le Roux published in No. 109 of the Art Absolument magazine. Published on January 11, 2024.

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