Deux vérités, un mensonge (Two Truths, One Lie)

Elouan Le Bars’ films, shot in live action or using 3D modelling, are developed from documentary material (testimonials, interviews, digital artefacts, found objects, etc.). They are often integrated into immersive installations in which everyday objects symbolise the power dynamics at play in environments such as museums, offices or even rage rooms. Through this back-and-forth between virtual and material spaces, Elouan Le Bars invents performative modalities in a register where strangeness blurs boundaries, creating fictional spaces that tend to heighten our perception of reality.
The title of the exhibition Deux vérités, un mensonge (Two truths, one lie) is borrowed from a team-building exercise meant to distinguish truth from fiction by guessing the falsehood among three statements. Presented for the first time as an installation, the film Peak Performance (2024) stages seven characters navigating a space that shifts between office, storage zone and art gallery as they move through team-building drills, collective improvisations and shared accounts of their professional lives. In such a setting, play and work merge with perspectives, lived disappointments and desires for advancement and recognition, carried by individual speech and group gestures.
The film forms the core of the exhibition, while part of its research material appears as a set of clues: masks, drawings integrating archival images, a 360-degree video and various set objects and costumes that place us on equal footing with the film’s protagonists, as if we might become them. The straw in which each character seems to search for something small heightens the mismatch with the reality of mostly dematerialized work and the desire to reconnect with nature. The team-building exercises return as improvised, unscripted scenes where sincerity and performance become indistinguishable. Pauses, transitions and peripheral gestures are left intact. These role-playing sequences outline a porous, collective body that slips free of the borders between filmic fiction and the material reality of the space, a porosity heightened by these more or less visible signs.
Like the role-playing card castle present in the exhibition, professional life forces us into the balancing acts we must constantly replay or even subvert. The characters discuss the conformity of bodies at work through dress codes. Their own wardrobe allows them to assess and interpret the models embodied by those who employ them. The costumes add to this sense of displacement; they do not fully belong to the characters and contribute to a form of opacity and indeterminacy, a floating space where identity remains unresolved.
In this theatre, emotions become tools, personal stories become material to be shaped and the collective becomes a set that must be maintained. It rests on devices of belief: storytelling, motivation, shared vision, corporate culture. And the narratives unfold between material realities and imaginary constructions: low-paid side jobs, a fish-canning factory, artificial landscapes, eternal snows, thick curtains, a bed one collapses into, schedules checked and rechecked.
The exhibition Deux vérités, un mensonge turns the viewer into a potential participant who steps into a game mirroring the conditions faced by contemporary workers, expected to perform their engagement and display enthusiasm and adaptability in all circumstances. In this endless loop and from within this behavioural laboratory, the straw scratches and seeps everywhere, nightmares linger, words deform from mouth to mouth, speeches and bodies align themselves. And in the wait for a deserved rest or a forbidden break, personalities thin out, drawn into the fragile skeletal constructions they try to build to the rhythm of the group.

Maëlle Dault