The dinghy is waterlogged and it won’t be able to float again in a hurry. The water constantly surging in keeps sinking it and the large hole pierced in its hull seems to be a bottomless pit that all the oceans of the world are rushing into, over and over. A shipwreck is solitary. It keeps filling itself and lapping up the same blackish water. This is true of individuals struck by misfortune and depression.
It is also true of this dinghy that is beyond saving. Even though, we must admit, its situation is not worsening – it is stagnating. The precarious position of the sculpture (Le calme après la tempête) stages this: partly tipped on its side, it has not entirely surrendered and finds a point of balance to straighten up its proud prow. Succumbing completely is out of the question, instead, the disaster is counterbalanced by a hint of pride, or by a force and physical principles, even mechanical ones.

Bolting, fitting, soldering, sanding, joining: for each of his works, Maxime Lamarche is on the job, donning workman’s dungarees in his workshop at the foot of the Pilat ranges. Such an act is not anodyne: it is through the intelligence of the hand that the young artist tackles the world of ideas. From this technical knowhow, he creates a form of resistance to the weight of the world, to the throes of chaos and the pressure of cultural standards. His work takes the form of well-used machines that dismantle the clichés of a charmed life: glory, success, and exoticism are bumped off the road in Maxime Lamarche’s work. And there, in the depths of the hold, we see how we can get by. His works strive to uphold a precarious balance between drowning and emergency, between panic and self-control, success and failure, dead calm and storm, day and night.

Thus, on this tenuous line of buoyancy, a whole row of bachelor machines is also balanced – incarnations of industrial and cultural shipwrecks. A Ford partly immersed in the Saône, Midnightswim, inspired by a scene from Hitchcock’s film Psycho, represents a kind of raft of cinema, a cultural industry whose finest hours are a thing of the past, and also a kind of raft of the automobile industry, which goes under in times of crisis. It is also the other part of the same car that was used for Soft Serve Boat. With its bodywork disassembled, the car is recycled into a speedboat floating (in a dry dock) in the industrial past of the valley of Durolle, in Thiers, where it was exhibited with a dignified working-class nostalgia, and with the ambition of conjugating the future into a future perfect, since it presented all the signs of the (now obsolete) futurist inventiveness of a James Bond vehicle. Another machine, Sauna-Malibu, (partly) trivialises the healthy spirit of the West Coast. It is a genuine, sculpted sauna, in a little cedar shack (cut in the Pilat) resembling the cabins of lifeguards that watch over Californian beaches. A mirage of Californian exoticism and a mirage of the buoy to cling to... Reaffirmed in these sculptures hung on the wall: the Méduses, copies of the lifebuoys of Malibu lifeguards, translucent on the surface, with the artificial and elastic consistency of silicone, they themselves give way under their own weight and seem to subside under that of their responsibilities...

However, these “mermaids”, with powers of attraction as formidable as they are pathetic, these “mermaids” that – according to the title – whistle and sing off key, over our heads and over Maxime Lamarche’s exhibition, also know how to make their voices heard in real life. Advertising, cinema, and television know how to foster awareness. Also, the handmade posters, flyers, signs, or neon lights are an integral part of the artist’s work. All the more so in that, for him, they are not only real communication tools, but also artworks that are duly framed and exhibited. In this way, he completes the circle from production to exhibition, via publicising; Maxime Lamarche considers every phase as a single seamless chain of production. From making, to presenting and publicising, from the secondary to the tertiary sector, there are no longer any breaks. However, one work escapes from this exposure demanded by the cultural industries: the railing attached to the staircase for the duration of the exhibition, that the spectators hold in the usual manner, and that thus assumes its place almost discreetly among the artworks. This tailor-made banister is finely crafted according to traditional techniques, thus somehow escaping from the footlights of the exhibition, while nonetheless taking on its full weight (Du vent dans les voiles… L’orage s’annonce). It also counterbalances the submerged artworks through its inherent ability to ascend.