To be cared for is also to be watched. To be healed is to be handled. Where does protection end and control begin? And what remains of us when care becomes an architecture that surrounds the body?

Stepping into Even Spectres Can Tire, we find ourselves within a landscape both natural and surgical. With clinical control and profound sensitivity, Varennes renders his world visible through the transparent skin of materials such as PVC and glass. The porous surface of the works open onto a layered universe; veins branching like fragile maps or complex steel formations. Here, we encounter what the artist describes as spectres: protective casings, enhanced structures that suggest a body without fully restoring it, fragments of armor. Everything is measured, everything held in tension, creating a geometry of care that sustains and confines. Within this anatomy, the materials are mechanical yet tender, artificial yet alive. In this silent parade, life persists without complaint; alongside what disturbs it, alive within its own wounds. 

The Pixies in the show embody this condition. Orthoses and apparatus that appear as possible alternatives to the body; poised between what has been and what is yet to arrive. Similar ambiguity is also conveyed in the form of the cocoon evoked in Ark. What appears as protection also suggests isolation; a body sealed off from the world. The cocoon shelters through enclosure; a membrane that holds the body in suspension and where longevity is not redemption but endurance. It becomes both refuge and confinement in a protective and porous skin that preserves life.

Echoing Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative worlds where fragility, transformation and survival coexist beyond binary oppositions; Varennes constructs a suspended ecosystem of becoming. Rather than staging conquest or resolution, the works inhabit a threshold. Bodies are altered but not erased and endurance becomes a subtle form of resistance.

When looking at Varennes’ work, we peer into the fantasy worlds and landscapes that the artist experiences digitally in video games. A trace of these imagined realms lingers in the branches of Millefleurs resting on the floor. Here, we find ourselves hovering between nature and fantasy, present and future. The strong scent invites the viewer to reconnect with the organic world after moving through the sterile domain of artificial structures.

The fantasy experience is carried forward in Spikes, fragments that emphasise enhancement through metamorphosis. In fantasy lore, elves are often portrayed as possessing sharpened hearing. The ears interrogate historical and contemporary economies of violence; they allude to wartime rituals in which a severed ear becomes a trophy. Presenting a mute testament to domination, cut from the body and reclassified as evidence yet here they are activated, pushing us into a peripheral world. In this merging of the real and the fictional, an organ once attuned to sound and perception is estranged from its function, transformed into an object relic - an artifact of power.

Even Spectres Can Tire unfolds as an artificial medical garden where meanings remain unsettled. A speculative world inhabited by spectres, where past and future overlap and unresolved histories continue to shape the present. Resonating with the concept of hauntology as theorised by Jacques Derrida, the exhibition suggests a condition in which the now is permeated by the ghosts of unfinished pasts and unrealised futures. These layered temporalities persist materially: suspended in glass, sealed in PVC and held within protective shells where endurance replaces resolution. Here, life remains poised between survival and transformation.

Text by Francesco Pasquini