Amandine Guruceaga: Fuegophilia

4 Jul

4 July–31 August 2025

“Fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all of life to its conclusion, to its hereafter. In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating and dramatic; it magnifies human destiny; it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world. The fascinated individual hears the call of the funeral pyre. For him destruction is more than a change, it is a renewal.”

Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, 1938

Amandine Guruceaga’s friendly devotion to fire was born from contemplating the kiln used by her parents, both professional metal enamellers. This early, foundational experience shaped the contours of her artistic practice: observing artisanal gestures and techniques; taming materials before their forms are licked by the flames; and appreciating the chromatic variations of enamels, applied in painterly strokes, before being melted or vitrified.

Since then, Guruceaga has circumvented the apparent immutability of materials by devising experimental processes and drawing on various forms of ancestral savoir-faire. Resilience operates as a matrix and takes on a threefold meaning in her work: first, the resistance of a material after impact (known as the resilience coefficient); second, by extension into the ecological field, the ability of a living system to withstand disturbances and return to equilibrium; and finally, the psychological capacity to bounce back – rooted in the very etymology of the word, from the Latin salire, meaning “to jump” – to overcome or survive trauma.

As a seamless extension of her exploration, Guruceaga developed a fascination for pyrophytic plants — species that have the remarkable ability to resist or even benefit from fire to reproduce. While some, like cork oak or giant sequoia, protect themselves through the thickness of their bark, others — such as rockrose or Aleppo pine — rely on extreme heat to trigger germination. The eucalyptus is a unique case: it emits flammable vapors that encourage combustion, enabling it to retain territorial dominance after the blaze. These diverse strategies of resistance and adaptation to fire have become fertile ground for the artist’s reflection.

In her political and environmental engagement, she adopts a stance oriented toward exploring both contemporary and ancestral responses — such as the preventive burning practices of Indigenous peoples — to the devastation caused by global warming. In Fuegophilia, fire escapes the hearth to devour and fertilize the landscape.

This ambivalence is expressed through paintings combining stretched dyed fabrics and burnt copper or brass. This Fire That Licks the Landscape, which spans over two meters, offers an ambiguous immersion into a twilight scene dominated by crimson red, lime green, fuchsia pink, and scorched copper, all set against a faded celestial blue expanse.

The sculptures invoke fertility through aerial seeds, made from textiles inflated with expanding foam — disproportionate and almost exaggeratedly swollen in the space usually reserved for branches. The black trunks supporting them are made of recycled PVC, hot-molded immediately as it leaves the extruder. Guruceaga contorts their rubbery, reptilian texture, recalling the grimly contemporary image of a vehicle tire melted onto asphalt. Seeds (flowers or fruits) and trunks are connected by strips of fabric or suspended ropes, creating an assemblage aesthetic that evokes a body in remission, while the artist employs a surgical and biological lexical field in her titles: La Greffe (The Transplant), 3 Embryos Fire, 2 Hearts 2 Knots.

From then on, Guruceaga directs her gesture toward an ethics of care — mindful to prioritize the use of recovered or recyclable materials, including those of synthetic origin. In increasingly extreme living conditions, the works of Fuegophilia create a contrast of almost hallucinatory intensity between vital force and annihilation.

The immersive musical composition by the French psychedelic rock band Moodoïd, conceived for the exhibition, acts as a vibratory binder between the works, weaving a sonic trance that is both experimental and phantasmagoric. The constant state of alarm and the reverie before the fire form an archaic cohabitation that nonetheless subjects our species to certain limits of sustainability.

Offshore, this same tension inhabits the horizon — the meditative shimmering of the waves in Malmousque Cove breaking against the Rock of the Hanged Men.

Clara Darrason