27 Jan 2026
Where Plants Breathe Through Sculptures: Antoine Renard's Hybrid Forms
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
Antoine Renard is an artist whose practice has consistently blurred the boundaries between materiality, sensation, and digital mediation, carving out a distinctive voice in contemporary art that resonates deeply with the conditions of our time. Born in 1984 in Paris and now living and working between Paris and Lourdes, Renard has developed over the past decade a body of work that unfolds across sculpture, scent, sound, and digital form, bringing together seemingly disparate elements in ways that challenge conventional perceptual hierarchies. His work is often described as protean not only for its formal diversity but also for its ability to navigate complex cultural, technological, and psychological terrains.
Renard’s recent solo exhibitions have traced a compelling arc through his evolving artistic concerns, each show marking a further articulation of his interest in the body as a site of memory and transformation. After his first presentation with Nathalie Obadia gallery in 2021, AMNESIA, in which he exhibited a suite of olfactory sculptures inspired by Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer and produced through 3D ceramic printing, he returned with STRANGE ATTRACTORS in Brussels in 2022. These earlier shows already revealed his fascination with how digital modelling, physical sedimentation, and aromatic signatures intersect to evoke layered histories and embodied experience. The most recent project presented in Paris, Demons (November 2024 – January 2025), further deepens this exploration by foregrounding the visceral and the invisible in a compelling synthesis of sculptural form, fragrance, and sonic environments. In this exhibition, Renard brought together a suite of 3D‑printed ceramic sculptures — anthropomorphic and spectral in their suggestion of bodies in various states of emergence — with an immersive constellation of scents and sounds. The works assume an almost ritualistic presence, drawing on research trips to regions such as Lourdes and the Peruvian Amazon, where he encountered traditional healing practices and the use of plants in mystical and therapeutic contexts.
The title Demons signals a thematic preoccupation that runs through the exhibition: an engagement with interior forces, collective and individual memory, and the processes by which traumas are inscribed upon and reworked through the body. By combining classical and archaeological reference points with digital scans sourced from platforms used in video game development, Renard’s sculptures gesture toward forms that are both archaic and hyper‑contemporary, resembling ruins not of a distant past but of possible futures. In the gallery space, these corporeal forms are activated by a perfumed atmosphere — a fictive psychotropic plant, crafted olfactory compositions, and ritual chant fragments that together evoke a hypnotic and enigmatic terrain.
Across his exhibitions, Renard’s practice makes visible the entanglement of digital and terrestrial registers, digital and earthly dimensions: 3D printing technologies, digital archives, and algorithmic processes are never presented as neutral tools but rather as imbricated with cultural histories, psychological textures, and corporeal traces. The resulting works often oscillate between figuration and abstraction, presence and absence, evoking a sense of continuity with art historical precedents while addressing the anxieties and imaginaries of the present moment. Renard’s sustained interrogation of memory — personal, collective, embodied — situates his work in a broader conversation about what it means to inhabit a post‑digital world. In an era where the digital seems simultaneously omnipresent and invisible, his sculptures, scents, and environments make tangible the often imperceptible forces that shape perception, identity, and relationality. Whether through the tactile irregularities inherent in digital fabrication, the evocative power of smell, or the mythic resonances embedded in his forms, Renard’s art insists on an expanded understanding of experience, one that refuses to separate the technological from the organic, the remembered from the imagined.
Alexander Burenkov: Your work often navigates the space between the telluric, the digital, and the chemical. How do you understand your practice within the framework of post-digital culture, where technology is simultaneously omnipresent and invisibilized?
Antoine Renard: I grew up as a teenager in the underground techno and psychedelic subcultures of France. Then, after my art studies, I moved to Berlin in the context of 2010s emerging post internet art scene, where I developed my work. At the time, everybody was reading e-flux, and we were influenced by thinkers like Sadie Plant, Manuel de Landa, Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, Jussi Parrika or Jeremy Rifkin to cite a few. Clubs and social media were also major influences in my environment. I watched the development of web 2.0, GoT, bitcoins, Ai and the Arab Spring while exploring alternate states of consciousness with ketamine and DMT. I was trying to navigate multiple materialities while observing the emergence of new technologies and their socio-cultural context. I remember 2015 and the rise of Daesh, which clearly was appropriating cultural codes from the digital to build their propaganda, like video game aesthetics and music video clips. My work is the product of all of this mishmash of encounters and weird influences. Technology is about minerals, but it is also a drug and a space altogether. Somehow, my practice mirrors these rather paradoxical or antagonist spaces.
AB: You frequently explore the “flaws” or irregularities created by advanced technologies such as 3D printing. How does embracing technological error inform your thinking about the post-digital condition — a world shaped by automation yet still marked by human unpredictability?
AR: I see errors as a disruptive event; they resist automation by informing the mechanical task of its fragile nature, which, in reverse, reflects on the nature of beauty in a philosophical sense. Probably part of the “post-digital condition” that you mention is about exactly that: looking for cracks within automated systems, like a resurgence of hope in perfected dystopian landscapes. I see bugs, glitches, code and mechanical errors as poetic machinic behavior; in a way, it reveals the subconscious of the digital.
AB: In a time when the digital realm tends to accelerate forgetting, your works insist on the persistence of memory. What is the relationship between algorithmic processes and human recollection in your recent projects?
AR: I actually think about algorithms as time markers; they generate specific patterns that usually end up influencing the perception of ourselves and the multiplicity of reality canvases. The specific lines on 3D printed objects, for example, are the stigma of the 3D print technology, like pixels on digital images. They express their own worldview, if I may say so. They express how we remember things, what we decide to keep, modify, or throw away. I like to use algorithms as ontological footprints in my projects.
AB: Your 3D-printed ceramics resemble accelerated forms of geological sedimentation. What attracts you to this paradoxical convergence of deep-time materiality and ultra-contemporary technology?
AR: I like the kind of confusion it creates. My sculptures express the ambivalent psychologies of technology, what it does to the body, the mind, how it influences human representations, and how we stand surrounded by it.
AB: Despite using high-tech tools, your sculptures often look like ruins or archaeological remnants. Do you intend them to be read as future artefacts — traces of our industrialized and spectacularized present?
AR: Yes, they could be, but my aesthetic is also the reflection of my own personal thinking. When I was a kid, and we were having a drawing contest with my brother, I remember being very frustrated because every time I would do a portrait of my sister, mother or dad, all of what the others could see was a “tête de mort” (skull). I usually work by elimination, starting with an idealized virtual idea, cutting into it until some sort of crude realness pops in, like something close and far in the same time.
AB: You speak about sculpture as an “extended field,” especially in relation to olfaction. In what ways is smell—invisible, ephemeral, bodily—able to expand or destabilize what sculpture can be today?
AR: I like the idea of smells as psychoactive objects. Odors are really interesting because they actively change the perception and impact of space and everything in it, and we all have different reactions when confronted with them. Smells happen in the mind of the viewer based on emotions rather than ideas, with smells you feel, thinking comes later. They have multiple materialities that really fascinate me. They engage with space and its architecture, but they are also a social, performative phenomenon, and a raw material transforming into an abstract sensation. Scientists talk about olfaction as quantum biology. Olfaction embraces the paradoxical complexities of our time while being one of the most primal senses we developed as human beings. It goes beyond visual based imagination by working mostly with intuitive thinking and synesthesia, stretching our mind to its plastic limitations.
AB: Your recent works use a custom algorithm trained on images related to Degas’ Little Dancer. What does it mean for you to explore the “psychological arcana” of a historical figure through machine learning?
AR: These works are about synthetic memories and algorithmic abilities to generate alternate narratives. I got interested in Degas’s Little Dancer as a figure of body exploitation, gender and class oppression embedded within modernity. I see the sculpture as a proto modern archetype on how a body can be used and abused, while still holding a strong and mysterious sense of resistance and strength. I wanted to reveal that strength via speculative, automated processes. As if the story itself revealed its hidden knowledge and traumas. It is said that machine learning never creates anything, they just articulate probabilities. I like to explore those probabilities.
AB: Your work brings together reactivated historical figures such as Degas’ Little Dancer and Donatello’s David. What drew you to these adolescent, fragile, and androgynous bodies as vehicles for addressing contemporary socio-political themes?
AR: After I finished art school and moved in Berlin in the late 2000s, I started rethinking completely my work in the perspective of my own teenage development, when I started exploring myself with electronic music, psychotropic plants and land explorations, Later I moved to look for newspaper stories and headlines about other youngsters around my age, going through dementia of psychopathologic behaviors, like Luka “Rocco” Magnotta or Romain Dupuy, as a way to distance myself from my own demons, while still exploring them. Then, I went a step further by sourcing my projects within history of art, I mean occidental history, as a way to expand my own personal concern with a shared cultural memory. I keep moving forward by diving into different world ontologies now, looking for the same patterns. I guess my work continues to be about finding shared and sharable patterns.
AB: In Strange Attractors, the hybridization of human and botanical forms creates a disquieting tension. How does hybridity allow you to question contemporary systems of production, identity formation, and the mythologization of bodies?
AR: Exposing hybridity is like exposing a production process, stating that things are multiple and complex, which tend to be hidden by sleek cultural industries, the industry likes pure forms. Exploring the hybrid nature of all things is a form of resistance toward suprematist thinking.
AB: You mention that you work on subjects “until they are exhausted.” What does exhaustion mean in your process? Is it conceptual, emotional, material — or all simultaneously?
AR: It means that I usually rework the same idea over and over again, like an obsession, making the work is an attempt to formulate my obsessions and to position myself within them. Some ideas are more complex than others, I keep repeating the process until I find myself in peace with the subject, which can take several years of formal and conceptual explorations, exhibitions, research etc.
AB: This integration of scent and sonic vibration with sculptural objects is emblematic of your wider interest in expanding sculpture beyond its traditional, visual‑centric modes into a multi‑sensory field. Your doctoral research — undertaken within the SACRe programme at PSL University and the École des Beaux‑Arts de Paris — focuses on olfaction as an extended field of sculptural experience, questioning how memory, identity, and affective response are mediated through sensory processes that precede language and conscious articulation. Smell is indeed deeply connected to memory and emotion. How do you choreograph the olfactory experience of an exhibition so that it becomes a form of narrative or psychological activation?
AR: It depends on the project, the type of space, the cultural context, etc. My first olfactory installation included 27 scented sculptures displayed in a “grid” formation on the totality of the gallery. Visitors were driven both by their nose, the shape of the sculptures and the randomness of the parcours in the monotone grid. It is always very fun and challenging to imagine how to install smells. One thing I know is that they never come alone, there is always something carrying smells, it could be sounds, light, air, objects, architecture, people etc. Smells depend on a physical context.
AB: Your research with ‘shamanes parfumeros’ in Peru introduced a ritual and healing dimension to your use of fragrance. How has this experience reshaped your understanding of sculptural presence or the agency of artworks?
AR: Maybe it helped me to rethink centers and peripheries. Rituals and perfumes are highly structured; they do not leave any room for improvisation, like what needs to be experienced up front and what needs to stay hidden in the background. I like to understand my exhibition as a ritualized space where all aspects become part of the experience. But it does not need to be complex, sometimes they are very straightforward and simple.
AB: The algorithm produces images that you then soften by diluting ink on paper, allowing the digital patterns to take on a fragile, more human quality. Is this gesture a form of care, resistance to machinic opacity, or a way of reintroducing vulnerability into digital processes?
AR: You mean on my watercolor prints? It is not so much a question of purity, but a way to reintroduce a sense of depth with the print, it is probably closer to the idea of vulnerability and embed layers.
AB: You often describe your exhibitions as porous environments in which the works and the public engage in multi-sensory, non-linear dialogues. How do you conceive the exhibition space as a relational or living ecosystem?
AR: I would say relational, because they do not live on their own, they need the activation of visitors to emerge. It makes me think of something: are spirits relational or living entities? Like they live inside plants mostly (in Amazonian cosmology) and connect with humans when we ingest them. But what do they do when humans are not ingesting them? Do they live their life of spirit inside the plants independently from humans? Or are they only activated when we ingest the plants or the perfume?
AB: Your practice refuses the traditional divide between the figurative and the abstract. How do you envision the role of the viewer in this ambiguity? Are they a decoder, a participant, or a co-producer of meaning?
I don’t think viewers need any kind of decoder, the divide between figurative and abstract is an artificial modernist debate. Everything can be seen as figurative AND abstract at the same time. It is mostly a question of zooming in or out, some focus will show you one aspect, another will uncover a totally new perspective of the same thing. Meanings are fragile, and always "personal carry-on” items.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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