Xylomancie dormante: Amaury Darras
18 September - 31 October 2026
Overview
Amaury Darras, Porte-jarretelle Tamo, 2025
Amaury Darras, Porte-jarretelle Tamo, 2025
The fantastic novella The Shadow Out of Time, written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1936, relates the life of Professor Nathaniel Peaslee, who lost his memory for many years due to his mind being possessed by a member of an extraterrestrial civilization. Upon awakening, false memories and strange visions surface. The clues of this forgotten life lead him to investigate the existence of this hallucinatory society, engaging in a form of prophetic archaeology. This story fascinates Amaury Darras just as much as it echoes his artistic process.Like Professor Peaslee, the fine woodworker and sculptor works instinctively, creating his pieces without preliminary drawings, guided by the automatism of his movements. Inspired by pop aesthetics and video game iconography, his works renew the technique of woodworking, traditionally associated with elitist artisanal practice. The production of antique furniture reserved for a certain class acts as the maintenance of the impermeable boundaries that hierachize the social pyramid. Here, Amaury Darras explores contemporary cultures considered illegitimate by elites. He applies his technique to fantasy motifs, developing new visual codes: a refuge from the external world governed by power relations. Between traditional craftsmanship and the updating of forms, the artist blurs the tracks, and temporalities merge. Thus, exoskeletons populate space amidst indomitable vegetation. Moss infiltrates the carcasses, gradually devouring the traces of a vanished culture. Whether an ancestral civilization or a science-fictional painting of an anti-technological future, Amaury Darras's works become a space of blurred temporal coexistence. Humanity is absent, returning its place to nature, and reinforcing the tension between presence and absence: the resurgence of plant autonomy, of silent organic life. Amaury Darras crafts the manifesto for a Degrowth future. The invasive ecosystem clothes the concrete; the figures sleep peacefully, nestled in the greenery. Its muteness swallows the deafening march of progress, formulating a critique of the Capitalocene by evacuating any form of technology. A new science fiction emerges: going against the grain of Dune or Aurora, the artist moves away from the fantasy of space conquest, considered the civilizational peak. Instead, he advocates a drastic return to the earth, liberating modes of habitation from the colonial biases that run through our societies.

Through the intersection of woodworking and design, the artist suggests the bygone presence of bodies.Several wood species coexist in the space, from walnut to tamo ash, highlighting the multiple treatments of the material. These woods, of diverse geographical origins, emphasize the individualization of the identities of the reclining figures. Furthermore, clothing, emptied of its wearer, prompts us to question our Western projections.Usually governed by gender binarity, these preconceptions are blurred by the shapes employed. Our eye is questioned: what humans does our mind spontaneously picture? What form is sculpted by our idea of gender?How might non-normative, queer, or crip bodily representations impose themselves on our imaginations?Amaury Darras, through his wearable sculptures—the social extensions of our identities—reveals an alternative to the alienating codifications of our social representations and our feelings of belonging.

Antoine Bouffard
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