The images presented here stem from research and exploration. They do not constitute the realization of the work; in my practice, the proposal itself serves as the work.
The images presented here stem from research and exploration. They do not constitute the realization of the work; in my practice, the proposal itself serves as the work.
The images presented here stem from research and exploration. They do not constitute the realization of the work; in my practice, the proposal itself serves as the work.
The images presented here stem from research and exploration. They do not constitute the realization of the work; in my practice, the proposal itself serves as the work.
Statement of intent
Series from the Baghera Universe
Rupture and Continuity
For this series of artworks, I break with the purely conceptual approach that characterizes my work. Here, the artwork is no longer limited to protocol or instruction manual — it takes form, materializes, fully incarnates itself in reality.
While my fictional universes have always sought to infiltrate everyday life, this series pushes this logic to its conclusion: it makes gaming — a pillar of my personal life and constant source of inspiration — the central territory of the artwork. It fully assumes my dual identity as artist and gamer, without hierarchy or compromise.
The Artwork
Legendary Gear LVL 999 transforms toy weapons found during my travels into mythical gaming artifacts. Each object is customized, overloaded, pushed to the extreme: parodic aesthetics, obsessive details, unusable power. These weapons evolve according to video game logic, where experience accumulation leads to increasingly spectacular and absurd objects.
Each weapon is accompanied by its complete technical sheet: statistics, enchantments, special powers, and selling price in various virtual currencies (Riot Points, Lucent, Gold...) calculated proportionally to its real value in euros. This documentation creates a bridge between fictional economy and artistic value.
Anchoring in the Baghera Universe
In the Baghera universe, these weapons come from an XP-rience — an ultra-popular immersive MMO created by Paul Lia to distract the inhabitants of the Megalo-Paul. This reference inscribes the series in the narrative continuity of my universe while exploring an unprecedented facet: how does the governing artificial intelligence conceive entertainment? How does it transpose gaming's addictive mechanics into its management of the masses?
Paul Lia's XP-rience thus becomes a metaphor for our own relationship with virtual worlds: these spaces where we invest time, energy and desire, where we pursue impossible objects, where we build parallel identities.
Collaborative and Community Dimension
These artworks are born from my daily practice of multiplayer gaming. The weapons are named by my permanent gaming group — their pseudonyms appear on each sheet, crediting this collective authorship. This community dimension echoes the collaborative nature of MMOs, where individual experience exists only by and for the group.
It's also an assumed recognition: gaming is not merely a peripheral inspiration for my art, it's a central social, creative and emotional territory in my life. These artworks materialize this reality.
Creation Process
The weapons are assembled from elements found during my travels and stored in my workshop. Each component carries its own history, its own geographical and temporal provenance. The act of creation becomes an assembly of memories, a fusion of found objects that acquire a new mythological identity.
This approach follows a logic of reuse and diversion: giving a second life to fallen objects, reinscribing them in an alternative value system where their primary utility disappears in favor of a new symbolic and aesthetic charge.
Exhibition Modalities
Three presentation environments are envisioned, each activating a different reading:
The modern military armory — cold, functional aesthetics, which underlines the paradox between the martial aspect of objects and their fundamental uselessness.
The heroic fantasy merchant — immersion in the game universe, theatrical staging that fully assumes the ludic and spectacular dimension.
The trophy room — museification of objects, distancing that reveals their artistic dimension and their exhibition value.
Particular Status in My Practice
Legendary Gear LVL 999 occupies a paradoxical place in my work: for the first time, the artwork cannot exist without its material realization. Yet this series deals with objects that are, in their very essence, purely virtual — video game weapons that exist only as data, pixels, algorithms.
The irony is total: while my conceptual practice usually maintains my artworks in the immaterial, I choose here to materialize precisely what was never meant to be. It's inverted conceptual art: instead of dematerializing reality into concept, I materialize the virtual into object. The gesture thus becomes doubly subversive: it betrays both my usual method and the very nature of its subject.
This evolution potentially opens a hybrid path for my future creations: artworks that exist both as protocols and as objects, as ideas and as incarnations. A synthesis between the conceptual approach that characterizes me and a more direct exploration of making, gesture, material transformation.
The images presented here stem from research and exploration. They do not constitute the realization of the work; in my practice, the proposal itself serves as the work.