ParisPictureClub
20 passage Saint-Sébastien 75011 Paris
contact@parispictureclub.com
@parispictureclub
contact@parispictureclub.com
@parispictureclub
05/2026 - “MAGNET 3” by Elisa Florimond
I have been commisionned by Elisa Florimond for her first solo-show abroad, at the Röda Sten Konsthall, a former boiler house transformed into a contemporary art museum near Göteborg, Sweden. Elisa is a multiskill artist with an ability to express herself throught sculpture, painting and photo/video displays. She works a lot on the relations between objects, “questioning the rationalist classification systems of museums and the notion of appropriation”,as explained by Margaux Knight :
"Her 'parallel museum' questions our relationship to cultural and natural environments, and offers critical and poetic devices that put in crisis our ways of classifying, comparing, and contemplating."
The exhibition has been conceived in 2025 in collaboration with Frac Bretagne, Art Norac and the Röda Sten Konsthall, curated by Amila Puzić.
https://elisaflorimond.fr/
We didn’t exactly know what to do at the begining but Elisa provided me with references and unfinished researches that she has been working on. We were happy to take some time iterating ideas to figure out what to make out of this collaboration. So I started by taking her references, adding some of mine and dropped about ten completely different ideas such as displays, cabinet, boxes or sculptural lighting. I used both 3D and inhouse custom AI to process them. Funny thing is we didn't end up using any of these ideas. But it was kind of a warm-up to start a discussion.
At some point we decided that it would be better to have one single large structure that could handle lighting, vertical and horizontal display. It should be large enough but without outweighting Elisa’s artwork itself. We were also interested in working with aluminium for its lightness and the deep reflections it offers, very welcome in a room not provided with natural lighting. So my mission was to design a modular aluminium shelving system to display her selection of sculptures, photos, vertical panels and found objects. The system should be easy to assemble directly on site within a day or two. The modularity allowed us to decide the final proportions at the very end. An existing pillar is used as a cross-bracket and the upper part is composed by vertical panels that also give stability to the structure and serve as a linear light diffuser.
Along the process came the feeling that some part of the shelving system should be the direct expression of our collaboration. We wanted it to be a meeting point between both our worlds. That’s how we came to design a connector that could allow us to meet the technical requirements of modularity and in the same time would be a sculptural object. The connector is a plastic collar that holds the tubes and sheets together. It is thick enough to be ornamented. Elisa has sculpted 14 differents ornaments in soap and handled them to me for scanning, refining and adapting them to fit the right dimensions. We were then able to print them directly, each sculpture appearing 3 to 5 times in the final system.
Image credits : Photos of the exhibition by Andrej Lajmut, images of the process by Elisa Florimond and Terri Champavier
Credits : Magnet Exhibition, production by Frac Bretagne and Roda Sten Konsthall.