Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
81x54 cm - 31,5x21 in - 2015
Métamorphique
Drawing from discarded Physics and Biology books in the CNRS archives, the Métamorphique series explores the concept of recycling in the age of digitalization through the lens of material transformation. The term “metamorphic” is borrowed from geology, where rocks undergo profound structural changes under pressure and heat without melting.
This project examines the implications of paper’s obsolescence as an information medium, questioning what becomes of knowledge when its physical support is deemed expendable. As scientific archives are digitized and their paper originals discarded, these books—once vessels of discovery and learning—enter a liminal state between waste and potential. The work delves into new dimensions of reading, where the materiality of the page supersedes its textual content, and the act of folding becomes a form of reinterpretation, obsolescence becomes resurrection, and the end of one life cycle marks the beginning of another.
This metamorphic process operates as a form of mnémoplastie—sculpting memory itself. The folded books become palimpsests where scientific knowledge, rather than disappearing, undergoes a mnemonic transformation. Each fold consolidates what the book remembers of its former purpose, creating stratified traces that resist complete erasure. What appears as material obsolescence reveals itself as hypermnesia: the discarded archive remembering more intensely through its physical transformation than it ever did as a consulted text.
Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
80x80 cm - 31,5x31,5 in - 2015
Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
50x50 cm - 20x20 in - 2014
Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
52x32 cm - 20,5x12,5 in - 2015
Chronotopique
The Chronotopic series explores the intersection of space and time through the transformation of matter. The term “chronotopic” refers to the merging of temporal and spatial dimensions—a concept borrowed from the theory of relativity—where geographical maps become receptacles of memory, their folds recording both the journeys undertaken and the passage of time itself.
Each fold becomes a chronotope: a point of convergence where distance traveled and time lived condense into a single point. The maps, marked by repeated folds, bear the traces of countless itineraries, transforming cartographic space into a medium for lived experiences that carry information and allude to the theory of quantum memory.
The work explores how memory is sedimented in matter, how space bends under the weight of time, and how this act of bending becomes a meditation on relativity.
Discordantique
Born from a period of personal upheaval, the Discordantique series explores the concepts of destruction and reconstruction through the geological phenomenon of unconformity—the meeting of rock layers of vastly different ages and origins, separated by erosion, time, and tectonic forces. The term “unconformity” refers to the surface that separates two sequences of strata with distinct histories, a break in geological continuity that, paradoxically, creates new formations by linking disparate temporal fragments.
This series emerged from the deconstruction of unsatisfactory, failed works born of a chaotic period. The canvas shattered, its fragments scattered like tectonic plates after a rupture. Later, some pieces were distorted, others reassembled into two new compositions, creating an assemblage of memory and matter. To these remnants were added pages from the Korean Jikji, a Buddhist text and the first printed book in history (1377), as if to suture the wound—in the spirit of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold, where the repair celebrates the fracture rather than erasing it.
The work does not conceal its history of fragmentation, but rather celebrates it, making visible the discordances—the ruptures, the missing intervals, the abrupt transitions between incompatible times. What emerges is neither the restoration of the original nor its complete erasure, but a third state: a discordant stratigraphy where personal trauma and historical memory, destruction and repair, past and present converge on the same surface. In these discordances lies not weakness, but resilience: the capacity to hold together contradictory temporalities, to bring forth beauty from discontinuity, to transform the violence of rupture into new creation.
Orogenèse
Book pages and maps - ink
2017 - 2018
Discordance - 지질학적 부정합
Korean Hanji paper (mulberry leaves) and pages from Jikji - 직지 (Buddhist teaching book), first book printed in metal characters in history.
81x54 cm - 31,5x21 in - 2024
Noyau - 핵심
Pages from Jikji - 직지 (Buddhist teaching book), first book printed in metal characters in history.
80x80 cm - 2024
Trou noir - coupe
Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
50x50 cm - 2024
Régénératique
The “Regenerator” series explores cycles of regeneration through land art interventions that symbolically reintegrate paper into the organic world from which it originates. The term “regenerative” refers to processes that not only avoid harm but actively restore ecosystems, going beyond mere sustainability to create a positive ecological impact.
Replanter les livres, Jeter l'encre, Retrouver la mémoire (2021), created for the Lieurac Land Art Festival in Ariège, symbolically reintegrates books into the soil from which their paper came. “Paper Fugue” (2019)—musical scores folded and then glued onto beech tree trunks in Finieyrols, in the Aubrac region—creates ephemeral notations on the bark.
These interventions are then removed because the ink and glue are not biodegradable, and they only have a symbolic and ephemeral value, highlighting the problem of the materials complexity making it impossible to biodegrade all of its objects, even the simplest ones.
Replanter les livres
Jeter l'encre
Retrouver la mémoire
Books found in a book box on the path
Lieurac Land art festival - Ariège - 2021
Fugue de papier
Musical score of a fugue on a beech tree trunk
Finieyrols - Aubrac - 2019
Pages from Geology book on slate
Finieyrols - Aubrac - 2019
Branches
Pages from History book on wood
Finieyrols - Aubrac - 2019
After studying history, geography and art at Université Paris Cité, and earning a degree in graphic design from École Estienne Paris, Erwan Soyer has been developing an artistic practice since 2010 that explores exclusion, discarding, and the mechanisms of memory and forgetting. His work draws inspiration from surrealist poetry, geological processes, natural cycles and phenomena, theoretical physics, and psychological concepts.
Working primarily with books and archives destined for destruction—including volumes of physics and biology from the CNRS archives discarted after digitization, or simply salvaged book pages—his practice explores the material obsolescence of paper as a metaphor for the psychological processes of erasure and persistence. His work examines what exists on the margins: materials that have exhausted their primary function but retain a latent potential, like repressed memories harboring dormant meaning within the psyche.
Developing a unique paper-folding technique inspired by Baroque art and geomorphology, and working with materials in a raw and organic way to evoke the stratified nature of memory, her approach can be described as Mnemoplasty (from the Greek mnêmê, memory + plastos, molded) – sculpting memory as an artistic material. His work considers paper, the medium of information, as an analogy for brain neuroplasticity. Folding and erasing reflect how memory is neither fixed nor lost, but perpetually reshapeable. His work draws on scientific processes – metamorphic transformation, chronotopic fusion, geological discordance, stochastic perturbation, and psychological anamnesis – considered as resources structuring both the visual appearance and the mental experience of the pieces.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including a commission for the private collection of the Alpina Hotel in Gstaad, Switzerland, and site-specific installations in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. His works are also featured in private collections in New York and Los Angeles. He has also completed numerous commissions for publishing and the press: five illustrations for the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, two book covers for Juan Villoro published by George Braziller in New York, a cover for the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, and an illustration for Le Monde Diplomatique.
Art Commissions - Illustrations
Art collector - Los Angeles - 2024
1 large piece
Le Monde diplomatique - 2023
1 illustration
The Missouri Review - 2021
Cover - 1 illustration
Domaine du Roc - Villars-sur-Ollon - Switzerland - 2021
2 Diptych (100x70cm)
Süddeutsch zeitung magazin - 2018
Cover - 1 illustration
Domaine du Roc - Villars-sur-Ollon - Switzerland - 2017
1 Triptych (92x73cm - 36x29in)
George Braziller publishing - NYC - 2015-16
Juan Villoro’s books - 2 covers
Shooting Star - Clubhouse in Jackson Hole - Wyoming - 2015
2 pieces (92x73 cm - 36x29 in and 55x33cm - 21,5x13 in)
Art collector - NYC - 2014
1 large piece
Trip and Tpm magazines - São Paulo, Brazil - 2014
2 illustrations
Causette magazine - 2013
2 illustrations
Bavarian Opera - Munich - 2013
5 illustrations - Max Joseph magazine
Alpina Gstaad Palace - permanent collection - 2012
Triptych (92x73 cm - 36x29 in) Ordered by Soho Myriad Art consulting London
Exhibitions - Interventions
Replanter les livres, Jeter l'encre, Retrouver la mémoire - 2021
Lieurac Land Art Festival, Ariège
YONG - 2018
MO.CO. Montpellier - Contemporary art museum
Festival Corée d'ici
RE—PLI - 2015
Collective exhibition - Centre d'art La Fenêtre
Montpellier
More Money More Problems - 2013
Collective exhibition
3/some Art space - Cergy
Urgent !! 3 - 2013
Residence - exhibition - performance - Collectif Patrice Soletti
International Art and Landscape Centre - Vassivière
100 Days 100 Curators - 2012
Online exhibition, selected by Amanda Hunt
Saatchi Gallery - London
Territoire négatif - 2012
Photographic projection based on a reading of the text “Buildings” by Pierre Soletti at the Montpellier Microfestival - La Baignoire
erwan-soyer.tumblr.com
The Artling
Contact
06 77 48 50 32
erwan.soyer.art@gmail.com
Serres d’Auteuil - Paris
Résilientique
The “Résilientique” series documents the paradoxical spaces of botanical gardens—the Serres d'Auteuil in Paris and Kew Gardens in London—where scientific research and public spectacle converge within architectures of conservation and captivity. Photographed through glass that functions simultaneously as windows and barriers, these images question humanity's persistent drive to master the plant world.
This desire to control nature dates back to the Neolithic Revolution. Greenhouses represent its culmination: hyper-controlled microclimates where temperature, humidity, and light are regulated to maintain ecosystems uprooted from their native geographies.
Charles Darwin understood that survival depends on the capacity for adaptation—a resilience acquired through constant interaction with a changing environment. The paradox lies in the fact that these spaces designed to protect create a new fragility. Plants kept in greenhouses develop an absolute dependence on human control. They lose their natural resilience. The sanctuary becomes ecological atrophy: the specimens survive only through constant technical intervention.
These institutions, veritable laboratories of life, have also been essential to the scientific understanding of biodiversity and the conservation of endangered species, while contributing to the dissemination of botanical knowledge and serving as sources of pharmaceutical discoveries. The greenhouse thus emerges as a site of ambivalence: sanctuary and cage, preservation and absolute control.
Kew gardens - London
Effacement automatique
In dialogue with the Surrealist practices of automatic writing, the "Effacement automatique" series reverses the creative gesture: rather than generating text through an unconscious flow, these works exhume a latent poetry through selective erasure. Using pages torn from discarded books, they create accidental poems that emerge from the suppression of the surrounding text.
Where automatic writing sought to circumvent rational control to access the unconscious, automatic erasure reveals what lies dormant within existing texts: hidden narratives, unexpected juxtapositions, and semantic ruptures previously illegible. The act of erasure becomes a form of anamnesis, a method for discovering what the text secretly meant, like traumatic memories that resurface intermittently and in fragments, rather than through a linear narrative.
On some pages, oil paint is applied, forming bubbles of memory where words and maps mingle like dream fragments. These bubbles evoke the mechanisms of cryptomnesia: how certain words, phrases, or images spontaneously emerge from the depths of consciousness, while others remain buried, subject to a kind of amnesia.
Like dreams that condense and alter the meaning of thought, these automatic erasures transform the prose of abandoned books into enigmatic verses—traces of a mysterious unconscious, now reconfigured into new forms of uncertain and fragmentary beauty. They map the topography of forgetting, where some words become elusive territories, while others emerge with unexpected clarity from the erased page.
Rêve
Page from book
2025
Terre
Page from book
2025
Ma Lisa
Page from book
2025
Phénix - φοῖνιξ
Ancient Greek - Probably meaning "blood red"
Page from book - oil paint
2025
Pax
Page from book
2025
Apolline Juna
Page from book
2025
Gloria Erell
Page from book
2025
Tranquille
Page from book
2025
Jusqu’au
Page from book
2025
The tempest
Page from book
2025
Oiseau
Page from book
2025
Le coup de tonnerre
Page from book
2025
Oui
Page from book
2025
Souvenir imaginaire
Page from book, oil paint
2025
Psychogénéalogie
Page from history book, map, oil paint
2025
Acte manqué
Page from history book, map, oil paint
2025
Aboulie Géopsychique
Page from history book, map, oil paint
2025
Histoire ancienne - 古代史
Page from historical atlas, oil paint
2021
Pédagogique
Created for a children's book, the Educational series features collages of engraved vegetables surrounded by curious little hands engaged in playful experiments: measuring with calipers, timing, tapping with a hammer, and examining them with a magnifying glass.
The series uses humor and surreal juxtapositions to spark curiosity about vegetables. By transforming familiar foods into objects of scientific wonder, it suggests that everyday produce deserves the same attention and respect as rare discoveries. The absurdity of the experiments—tapping a mushroom, timing a pea—creates a visual humor that restores interest to vegetables, not through nutritional lessons, but through the pleasure of observing them closely and imagining them in a new light.
Phusis - φύσις
Natural phenomena - Ancient Greek
Engraving, collage
2018
Le navet
Engraving, collage
2018
L’asperge
Engraving, collage
2018
Le champignon
Engraving, collage
2018
Les pois
Engraving, collage
2018
Symbiotique
The Symbiotique series explores humanity's place in the vastness of space through collages that layer astronomical images, terrestrial landscapes, and human silhouettes. Through negative space cutouts, these works create a visual dialogue between scales: the infinitely large in dialogue with the infinitely small.
The symmetry of the images suggests both belonging and complementarity—a reciprocal relationship between what humans extract from nature and what nature imposes upon them. Does humanity remain subject to cosmic forces, or has it itself become a geological force? In an era where human activity is reshaping planetary systems, the Anthropocene, the series questions the possibility of new forms of symbiosis.
By superimposing images of radically different scales—terrestrial surfaces, celestial bodies, chromatography—the work abolishes distances, suggesting that the local and the cosmic, the intimate and the vast, coexist on a continuum. What emerges is neither separation nor exploitation, but a complex coexistence: human beings shaped by environmental forces, learning to coexist within systems that transcend them, finding their place not through exploitation but through participation.
Pandemique
Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pandémique series juxtaposes images of boats with biological photomicrographs from CNRS archives—magnified views of cellular structures, microorganisms, and organic matter. The collision of nautical imagery with biological abstraction creates a visual metaphor for navigating invisible threat: boats adrift on surfaces that resemble viral cultures, sailing through magnified bodily landscapes, attempting passage through territories simultaneously vast and microscopic.
The boat, historically a symbol of journey and quarantine (the term itself derived from quaranta giorni, the forty days ships were isolated during plague), becomes a figure of uncertain navigation through biological crisis. These vessels float on what could be ocean surfaces or cellular membranes, traverse what might be waves or viral particles. The pandemic collapsed distances while magnifying the invisible: what threatened us existed below perception, yet its effects were globally felt. These works operate in that scalar ambiguity—are we looking at seas or cells, at maritime charts or microscopic slides?
The boats navigate these uncertain waters without clear destination, embodying the experience of moving through a crisis whose scale and trajectory remained fundamentally unpredictable.
Mars
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Avril
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Mai
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Juin
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Juillet
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Août
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Septembre
Biological Photomicrography
CNRS Archive
Géopoétique
Created during a residency in 2013, at the Centre International d'Art et du Paysage de l'Île de Vassivière for URGENT !! 3, a collaborative intervention with the collective Patrice Soletti, the Géopoétique series engages with the intersection of geography and poetry—the practice of writing that emerges from and responds to place. The term derives from the geopoetic movement founded by Kenneth White, which proposes that landscape is not merely setting but active participant in the generation of thought and language.
Working with poems Fabrice Caravaca had written while circumnavigating the island, the project retraces his path—a practice that also echoes the Situationist concept of dérive (drift) theorized by Guy Debord, where walking becomes a method of psychogeographic investigation, revealing how terrain shapes perception and emotion. Walking the same circuit, photographing these texts at the locations where they were believed to have been composed, the work attempts to reunite words with the landscapes that generated them—creating a temporal and geographic echo between two acts of walking separated by time.
Stochastique
This series arises from a disruption of the cartographic act itself. Maps—instruments designed to fix space in stable and rational coordinates—are subject to stochastic movements, that is, movements arising from chance, during digitization, transforming geographical certainty into oscillating traces. The result is visual artifacts that resemble recordings of scientific data: seismographs measuring tectonic movements, electrocardiograms capturing the heart's electrical activity, electroencephalograms recording neuronal activity.
Geography becomes physiology; the map ceases to represent the territory and instead records the unstable conditions of its own capture, like the uncertainty principle borrowed from quantum mechanics and chaos theory. The act of measurement in the presence of random movement inevitably disrupts what it seeks to document. A map claims to offer an objective, deterministic truth, but the act of digitizing in motion reveals what cartography represses: space is never static, movement is inherent, and observation itself participates in the generation of what it observes. What appears on the page is not a territory, but the turbulent interface between deterministic intention and stochastic deviation—the collision of order and chance.
The resulting images oscillate between control and chaos, rationality and organicity. They are maps that have forgotten how to map, geographical data transformed into pure signal—visual frequencies of a world in perpetual motion, refusing to be fixed, claiming its right to vibrate, to oscillate, and to escape the frameworks we impose upon it. Reality, when observed in motion, becomes probabilistic, and the world resists all attempts at control.
N° 01
N° 02
N° 03
N° 04
N° 05
N° 06
Infinitique
These negative photographs of sand surfaces create ambiguous terrains where scale becomes indeterminate. The images oscillate between the infinitely large and the infinitely small—lunar landscapes photographed from orbit, or microscopic granular structures. A grain of sand resembles a crater; ripples appear like galactic formations.
This erasure of scale evokes the convergence sought by the theory of everything: the unification of quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity, which respectively describe phenomena at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The negative inversion further destabilizes perception; what emerges is neither landscape nor microscopy, but a pure form existing beyond the human scale, suggesting that reality, at its most fundamental level, operates where the infinitely vast and the infinitely small become indistinguishable—the territory where any theory of everything must be situated.