Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
81x54 cm - 31,5x21 in - 2015
Métamorphique series
Drawing from discarded Physics and Biology books in the CNRS archives, the Métamorphique series explores the concept of recycling and upcycling 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—a process that mirrors the transformation of obsolete books into new artistic forms.
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, cutting, and layering becomes a form of reinterpretation.
Like metamorphic rock formations that preserve traces of their original composition while becoming something entirely new, these works retain fragments of their scientific origins—diagrams, equations, anatomical illustrations—while transcending their utilitarian purpose. The transformation is both physical and conceptual: obsolescence becomes resurrection, and the end of one life cycle marks the beginning of another.
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
Trou noir - coupe
Physics and biology books derived from the archive of the French National Center of Scientific Research.
50x50 cm - 2024
Chronotopique series
Begun in 2015, the Chronotopique series develops a distinctive folded paper technique that explores the intersection of space and time through material transformation. The term “chronotopic” refers to the fusion of temporal and spatial dimensions—a concept borrowed from physics and literary theory—where geographic maps become vessels of memory, their folds recording both journeys taken and the passage of time itself.
Over time, this work has expanded into new dimensions, incorporating three-dimensional objects, IGN and Michelin maps with their memorial folds. Each fold becomes a chronotope: a convergence point where distance traveled and duration lived are compressed into a single gesture. The maps, marked by use and repeated folding, carry the traces of countless itineraries, transforming cartographic space into a palimpsest of lived experience.
This evolution remains rooted in a profound approach of becoming one with the environment, in a spirit close to organic architecture or biomimicry, where the artwork does not impose itself upon the world but emerges from it. The folded surfaces resonate with geological formations—strata, tectonic movements, orogenesis—echoing the natural dynamics through which landscapes themselves are shaped by time. The work explores how memory sediments within material, how space curves under the weight of duration, and how the act of folding becomes a meditation on relativity: the way we compress and expand our relationship to place and time.
Orogénique series
Born from a period of personal upheaval, the Orogenic series explores the concepts of destruction and reconstruction through the geological process of orogenesis—the formation of mountains through the collision, folding, and uplift of the Earth’s crust. The term “orogenic” refers to the tectonic forces that transform flat terrain into dramatic landforms, where pressure and fracturing give rise to new topographies.
This series emerged from the deconstruction of works with which I no longer felt aligned during a chaotic period in my life. The canvas shattered, its fragments scattered like tectonic plates after a rupture. Later, these pieces were distorted, others reassembled into two new compositions, creating an angular assemblage of memory and matter. To these remnants of earlier works, I added pages from the Korean Jikji, a Buddhist text and the first printed book in history, as if to suture the wound, in the spirit of kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold—where the act of repair celebrates the fracture rather than erasing it.
Like mountain ranges emerging from the collision of continental plates, these pieces bear witness to the creative potential of rupture. The old fragments—angular and fractured—coexist with new, pleated elements that act like tectonic sutures, uniting disparate moments into a unified whole. The work does not conceal its history of fragmentation but celebrates it, creating a visual stratigraphy where destruction transforms into elevation, chaos into structure, and pressure transforms fragmentation into new forms of beauty and resilience. Under the influence of orogenic force, what was broken is reborn, reconfigured and transformed.
Discordance - Jikji
Korean Hanji paper (mulberry leaves) and pages from Jikji, the first book printed in metal characters in history.
81x54 cm - 31,5x21 in - 2024
Noyau - Jikji
Pages from Jikji, the first book printed in metal characters in history.
80x80 cm - 2024
After studying at the École Estienne in Paris, Erwan Soyer has been developing a collage practice since 2010 that interrogates the residual, the discarded, and the obsolete. His work draws from surrealist poetry, biomimicry, and the intersections of art and science, engaging with materials at the threshold of their disappearance.
Working primarily with books and archives destined for disposal—including Physics and Biology volumes from the CNRS archives discarded after digitization—his practice confronts the implications of paper’s material obsolescence in the digital era. These remnants, expelled from their original circuits of knowledge production, become sites of potential transformation. The work examines what exists at the margins of use-value: materials that have exhausted their primary function yet retain latent possibilities for reactivation and reinscription.
He has developed a distinctive folded paper technique inspired by baroque art and geomorphology, working the material in raw and organic ways. This approach has evolved to explore various forms, materials, and surfaces, expanding into three-dimensional objects and incorporating elements such as Michelin maps bearing the traces of use, traditional Korean paper, and ink. The practice operates within a logic of becoming-with rather than imposing-upon, resonating with principles found in organic architecture and biomimicry, where form emerges from environmental dialogue rather than predetermined structure.
In 2012, Pierre Keller, artistic advisor responsible for creating the private art collection of the Hotel Alpina Gstaad, commissioned a triptych on the theme of mountaineering. Managed and installed by Soho Myriad Art Consulting, London, this work is exhibited alongside pieces by Gerhard Richter, Barbara Kruger, Henri Matisse, General Idea, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thomas Schütte, Isa Genzken, Tracey Emin, and Terence Koh.
Subsequently, he has realized commissions for private collectors, cultural institutions, and publications across Europe and the United States. These include site-specific works for the Shooting Star Clubhouse in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and multiple pieces for the Domaine du Roc in Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. Private collectors in New York and Los Angeles have commissioned large-scale works that continue to explore the material dialogue between obsolescence and potentiality, examining how discarded forms can be recuperated into new aesthetic and conceptual registers.
His practice operates at the intersection of material recuperation and formal invention, treating the rejected and the residual not as waste but as repositories of unrealized possibility—matter that has been excluded from dominant systems yet remains available for alternative modes of signification and presence.
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Contact : 06 77 48 50 32
erwan.soyer.graphiste@gmail.com
Archives : erwan-soyer.tumblr.com
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Online gallery :
→ The Artling
→ Saatchi art
Art Commissions
Art collector - Los Angeles - 2024
1 large piece
Domaine du Roc - Villars-sur-Ollon - Switzerland - 2021
2 Diptych (100x70cm)
Süddeutsch zeitung magazin - 2018
Cover for the newspaper’s revue
Domaine du Roc - Villars-sur-Ollon - Switzerland - 2017
1 Triptych (92x73cm - 36x29in)
Georges Braziller publishing - 2015-16
Juan Villoro’s books - 2 covers - NYC
Shooting Star - Clubhouse in Jackson Hole - Wyoming - 2015
2 pieces (92x73 cm - 36x29 in and 55x33cm - 21,5x13 in)
Art collector - New York - 2014
1 large piece
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
Exhibitions
2012 - Parallèle
Bookshop - Montpellier - France
2012 - 100 Days 100 Curators
Online exhibition, selected by Amanda Hunt
Saatchi Gallery - London
2013 - Urgent III
Residence - exhibition - performance - International Center
of Art and Landscape at Vassivière Island - France
2013 - M.M.M.P.
Troisome Art space - Paris - Cergy
2015 - RE—PLI
Collective exhibition - Centre d'art La Fenêtre
Montpellier - France
2018 - YONG
MO.CO. Montpellier - Contemporary art museum
dans le cadre du festival Corée d'ici
Illustrations
Erwan Soyer has created illustrations for major international publications including Le Monde diplomatique (France), The Missouri Review (United States), Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin (Germany), Trip and Tpm magazines (São Paulo, Brazil), and Causette magazine (Paris). Each commission adapts visual language to the specific editorial context, whether accompanying literary content, investigative journalism, or cultural commentary.
In 2014, He designed the book cover for Georges Braziller Publishing in New York, translating his collage aesthetic into the realm of book design. He has also worked with cultural institutions such as the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, creating a commission for Max Joseph magazine, and with the Fernande festival in Sète, France.
Effaçage automatique series
In dialogue with surrealist practices of automatic writing, the Effaçage automatique series inverts the creative gesture: rather than generating text through unconscious flow, these small-format works excavate latent poetry through selective erasure. Using torn pages from discarded books, creating accidental poems that emerge from the suppression of surrounding text.
Where automatic writing sought to bypass rational control to access the unconscious, automatic erasure reveals what lies dormant within existing texts—uncovering hidden narratives, unexpected juxtapositions, and semantic ruptures that were always present but previously illegible. The act of effacing becomes a form of reading, a method of discovering what the text secretly wished to say.
On certain pages, oil paint is applied, forming bubbles of memory where select words or maps float to the surface like fragments recalled from a dream. The bubbles evoke the mechanics of remembering—how certain words, phrases, or images rise unbidden from the depths of consciousness while others remain submerged, irretrievable.
The works exist at the intersection of poetry, visual art, and the archaeology of language. Each piece becomes a palimpsest of presence and absence, where what is erased is as significant as what remains. The torn edges of the pages acknowledge their material fragility and their extraction from a larger whole, while the selective revelation of words suggests that meaning is not fixed but perpetually constructed through acts of attention and omission. Like dreams that condense and displace meaning, these automatic erasures transform the quotidian prose of discarded books into enigmatic verses—memory traces of texts that once existed, now reconfigured into new forms of uncertain, fragmentary beauty.
Sismographique series
This series emerges from a disruption of the cartographic act itself. Maps—instruments designed to fix space into stable, rational coordinates—are subjected to movement during the scanning process, transforming geographic certainty into oscillating traces. What results are visual artifacts that resemble scientific data recordings: seismographs measuring tectonic shifts, oscilloscopes capturing electrical frequencies, electroencephalograms tracing neural activity.
The controlled grid of cartography—longitude, latitude, territorial demarcation—collides with organic turbulence. As the map moves beneath the scanner's reading eye, rational space fragments into waves, rhythms, and vibrations. The linear logic of roads and borders dissolves into patterns that evoke biological signals: heartbeats, brainwaves, the tremors of geological fault lines. Geography becomes physiology; the map ceases to represent territory and instead records the unstable conditions of its own capture.
These works interrogate the myth of fixed space. A map pretends to offer objective truth—a bird's-eye view, a God's perspective—but the act of scanning-in-motion reveals what cartography represses: that space is never static, that movement is inherent, that measurement itself disturbs what it seeks to document. The scanner, like the scientist's oscilloscope, does not passively record but actively participates in generating the data. What appears on the page is not the territory but the turbulent interface between observation and instability.
The resulting images hover between control and chaos, rationality and organicity. They are maps that have forgotten how to map, geographic data transformed into pure signal—visual frequencies of a world perpetually in flux, refusing to be pinned down, insisting on its right to vibrate, oscillate, and escape the frames we impose upon it.
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