The entirety of Trannois’s exhibition In Praesentia at La Villa du Parc was inspired by the venue’s domestic atmosphere, which he infuses with the delicate and amnesiac traces of a vanished personality that the artist conjures up indirectly and implicitly. In the situated installations appearing like flashes in the mind, paint seeps like moss over materials and objects of a personal environment, generating transitional states, on the mental and material levels, between interior and exterior. The artworks are rallying points of a fragmented, hesitant memory that register the tremors of forgetting, using a simplistic symbolic vocabulary, one that is practically meant for survival, as a foundation, a stable support. The void has its place both physically and mentally. It renders all the more perceptible, vibratory even, the forms that take shape there, whether they are solid and sturdy or slight, almost insubstantial.

Clearly situated in their space, Trannois’s installations look like mental flashes in which the pictorial gesture has fastened on objects that are filled with memories and taken from a private setting. Elements in a wide range of sizes and natures seem to have simply piled up. They have found their equilibrium by becoming frozen in an image. The supports are often massive, abrupt, echoing elements making up the surrounding architecture or furniture. These include a large openwork metal guardrail, a disassembled fence-like structure, wooden posts attached to curving walls, and a large construction tarp. They are rendered softer thanks to added carnal touches of color, fragmentary figures, light perishable elements such as pine needles or painted ribbons, like allegories of passing time and distant references whose meaning has been lost in part. Painted envelopes, bits of cloth, dyslexic poems, branches, feathers, porcelain shards are scattered over these furnishings with their offbeat use, or are encapsulated under panes of Plexiglas fixed to the wall or on the corner of a door. Meeting points or holding areas – here a telephone handset attached to pieces of wood, there a pair of designer modernist armchairs behind a veil of hanging cables – have accumulated relics and small-format collages, crystalizing the absence of a fictional character.

In this dreamlike world that fosters transitional states, musing, and images that linger in the mind, representational planes are switched around, outlines are sharpened, details blur and fade off, and the fluidity and reversibility of materials and genders take precedence. Chosen here for its solidity and fragility, porcelain is a plastic material that retains a trace of the least shock or stress as it solidifies. It acts like a metaphor of the brain, even occasionally taking on that organ’s oval shape. It is the support of painted forms and figures whose meanings are mysterious yet familiar, pushing us towards imaginary and alternate realities. As spaces for mental projects and backrooms of the mind, these works figure stylized, reified or fragmentary bodies, blending ambiguous actions and fantastical visions. Posters of significant exhibitions, the ones you keep in your bedroom or studio, over time become a formal support that is favorable to new combinations and collages.

The invitation extended to fellow artists instills a discreet supplementary rhythm to visitors’ tour of the show, over which the identity that has gone missing takes on multiple and subtle variations. Each collaboration thought out for the exhibition is built around a specific process of exchange and creative expression in connections that exist at different levels of porosity and influence. Those links infuse first a temporary assemblage of pieces of paper around a bluish bronze lamp that gives off a cool sensuality, created by the Ukrainian designer Polina Moroz. Or they are part of the sound world fashioned by the musician Félicia Atkinson, who has composed a new piece of music titled “Absent Friend” for In Praesentia. Nearby, in an intervening proximity, it’s a matter of borrowing from a friend a painting dating from the 1960s that is dear to him. The picture is by the legendary New York painter Sylvia Sleigh. Trannois places it alongside one of his oval paintings on porcelain. Or it’s about experiencing the dissolution of the figure of the artmaker, who ordinarily predominates in a solo show, by creating for two exhibition venues works that have been done in collaboration with the artist’s friend Jessy Razafimandimby. The two artists sign their joint artworks with the female-sounding name Quintana E.

There begins to take shape, perhaps, indirectly and as a kind of negative of the works on display, a figure subjected to various influences and with a range of identities, a hybrid being, a melancholic epicene dandy, one who is sensitive to the symbolism and the subconscious associations, magnetized by the experiences and visions that shuffle roles and make life more intense.

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Niels Trannois, a French artist born in 1976, now lives and works in Basel after a decade in Berlin. His practice as a painter goes way beyond the medium’s limits, extending into space, objects and photos, and opening up to joint authorship. His is an aesthetic projection that allows memories to resurface while paint is deployed as if it were an organic substance with the ability to reveal the surfaces it covers. His work draws on fantasized images, lived moments to be shared and fictional correspondences brought back to the material reality of widely ranging supports, from posters to porcelain to metal. His pieces oscillate between figuration and abstraction by means of an invented language of signs and drawings, the use of collage, and highlighting, often fragmentary echoes of reality. Thus Trannois generates a symbolic universe haunted by the vulnerability of memory, a memory transmitted by traces and personal and collective enigmas.