Perrine LACROIX

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residence supported by the Association Les Moulins de Paillard
supported by the Ministry of Culture-Drac des Pays de la Loire

Archaeology of gesture Rustiner.
This gesture, in Rustin's work, transcends its technical function to become a figure, a metaphor, a narrative fragment. It becomes a language in its own right, a sign of presence and care, capable of telling a story without resorting to words. Like Japanese kintsugi, which emphasises the fracture rather than concealing it, repair becomes a mode of appearance. In a world governed by the rhythm of capitalism, the value of an object is measured by its novelty and its capacity to be consumed and then discarded; rustiner thus becomes an act of resistance. The patch is no longer just a repair, it becomes an ecological gesture, an ethical gesture. It rejects the logic of planned obsolescence, it interrupts the race for instantaneity and replacement.
Perrine Lacroix's work focuses on what, at the heart of reality, escapes the gaze. In the enclosed space of the laboratory, she uses photography to capture these drawers where prints have been lined up for decades. Colours and textures of rubber and silicone, material archives that reveal the persistence of time and the constancy of matter. She then extracts these Colour Charts from their utilitarian organisation, lays them flat, and reorganises them according to an arithmetic logic that allows chance to emerge. The initial order is undone to reveal what the material retains of its own durations².
Under the factory roof, everything at first appears to be governed by protocol, repetition, metronomic rhythm and the segmentation of tasks. Productivist rationality operates as a mechanism of fragmentation, dissociating, cutting up and isolating each gesture in order to assign it a function, to the point of turning the body into a cog in the chain. However, movement is never purely mechanical. It carries layers of memory and know-how, condensing a culture and a relationship to the world. The tiny gap between the rule and its execution, the nuance of repetition, bring to the surface the possibility of a singular language, an inscription that resists erasure.
Faced with this mechanism, Perrine Lacroix undertakes a work of re-inscription in order to restore density to the mundane and power of appearance to the ordinary.
Photographing gloves shaped by use — each pair marked with the unique imprint of a job, a function, an action — is like unearthing the silent memory of bodies at work. Latex, collected from rubber trees as a protective, insulating and waterproofing material, preserves the echo of an ancient practice that each glove reflects.