Zero Gravity, Zero Compromise: Art at the Edge of the Possible

Two concurrent art shows at Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux make the most unexpected case for artistic freedom

Swiss scientist Jürg Nänni never picked up a paint brush. Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac never went to space. And yet the work both men set in motion – one in a quiet studio in the Swiss village of Umiken, the other in collaboration with an astronaut aboard the International Space Station – stands among the most genuinely adventurous art to be seen on the French Riviera this spring.

The Espace de l’Art Concret (eac) in Mouans-Sartoux is offering something rare: two independent yet complementary exhibitions, both running through 3 May 2026, illuminate each other in ways neither could manage alone. And that these two bodies of work share the same building at the same moment is not coincidence but curatorial conviction.

Jürg Nänni: Art & Science

^{Courtesy Espace de l’Art Concret}

The eac exhibition marks the first time the work of this Swiss scientist-turned-artist has been presented in France – which would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that Nänni died in 2019 having spent decades producing over 1,400 works in near-total obscurity. A physicist by training, he taught mathematics, building physics and computer science at the University of Applied Sciences in Brugg-Windisch for the better part of his career, and arrived at visual art through the side door – self-taught, unaffiliated, accountable to nobody.

What he made, once he got there, defies easy categorisation. Working from the late 1980s onwards, Nänni used strict mathematical rules and computer tools to generate compositions in primary colours – blue, yellow and red, with black and white in supporting roles – governed entirely by algorithmic logic. Random generators and cellular automata produced patterns that no individual hand, however skilled, could have planned. 

The results range from early Cartesian grids of cool rigour to the vibrant moiré waves and freely shaped multicoloured forms of his later years: a visual arc that feels, in retrospect, like the history of Concrete Art compressed into a single private practice.

^{Left: [JNI 325-Q2] – V1 : Jürg Nänni, sans titre, 20*20 cm, imprimante à jet d’encre sur papier, 2003 ;
propriété Jürg Nänni estate, Umiken ; [JNI 313 o] – V2 :  Jürg Nänni, 45 * 45 cm, monté sur plaque de plexiglas, 2008, propriété et exposition permanente FHNW Brugg, © Jürg Nänni estatePhase « Free Form, Free Color »}

^{Right: [JNI 311 q] – Jürg Nänni, sans titre, 100*100 cm, imprimé offset monté sur plaque d’aluminium, 1996, propriété et exposition permanente FHNW Brugg, © Jürg Nänni estate}

Nänni knew the canonical works of the Zurich Concrete Art group well, and admired the rigorous chromatic compositions of Richard Paul Lohse and the radical orthogonality of François Morellet. But his research went further, into territory that was genuinely his own, using the computer keyboard as his primary instrument at a time when that was anything but normal in art circles. That his work remained largely unknown during his lifetime, and was only comprehensively catalogued after his death, gives the retrospective an elegiac quality, as though an entire conversation had been happening in an empty room, and someone had finally thought to open the door.

The exhibition is not purely cerebral. A touchscreen installation called the Colour Kiosk allows visitors to explore Nänni’s chromatic experiments directly and playfully, offering welcome counterweight to the work’s conceptual rigour. Screen prints by Lohse and Verena Loewensberg – both significant influences on Nänni – appear alongside his own, grounding the show in its historical moment without turning it into a lecture.

L’art extra-terrestre au XXIè siècle

^{Courtesy Espace de l’Art Concret}

Through the château, the second exhibition, Extraterrestrial Art in the 21st Century operates at an entirely different register. Co-produced with the Observatoire de l’Espace, the cultural laboratory of the French space agency, this show brings together eleven artists whose work could not have been made on Earth. The operative word is “could”. These are not paintings inspired by images of Saturn. They are objects with verifiable extraterrestrial biographies.

Several were made aboard the Airbus ZERO-G, a specially configured aircraft that flies parabolic arcs to produce brief sequences of weightlessness – just 22 seconds at a stretch. In those 22 seconds, Stéphanie Solinas  – whose practice sits at the intersection of photography and installation – drew a line that was interrupted mid-stroke when weightlessness lifted her hand from the paper; the broken mark was later engraved in Carrara marble, as though to fix the moment of rupture permanently.

^{Stéphane THIDET
Détachement, 2024
Vidéo, 3 minutes 30 secondes
Collection de l’Observatoire de l’Espace du CNES, dépôt aux Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie
Toulouse
© CNES/Stéphane Thidet}

Stéphane Thidet, known for work that transforms everyday objects into disorienting presences, filmed a rope released from gravity’s constraints and found it moved with an unexpected animality; the rhythms it generated were transcribed into a musical composition. 

The approach varies but the quest for the sensual experience of art at the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere remains the same: 

^{Renaud AUGUSTE-DORMEUIL
Dansez maintenant, 2023
Installation vidéo, 24 minutes
Collection de l’Observatoire de l’Espace du CNES, dépôt aux Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie
Toulouse
© CNES/P. Gamot}

Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, a former fellow of the Villa Médicis whose work often interrogates the political life of images, turned his weightless experience into an immersive 24-minute video installation that conveys disorientation more than spectacle, while photographer Alain Bublex trained his lens throughout on a single motionless blue target, the stillness of the subject thrown into relief by his own body’s helpless lurching through the parabola.

Further still from Earth, Eduardo Kac – a Rio-born artist long preoccupied with the border territories between poetry, science and technology – produced a work aboard the ISS without ever leaving the ground. He designed a protocol: a paper sculpture whose subsequent drift through the station’s modules was filmed by an astronaut following his precise instructions. The question of authorship that raises is left deliberately open, and that openness is the work’s subject as much as its condition.

^{Victoire THIERRÉE
Caillou, 2024
Sculpture en acier brossé et ciré
25 × 27 × 41 cm
Collection de l’Observatoire de l’Espace du CNES, dépôt aux Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie
Toulouse}

Not everything in the exhibition involves aircraft. Victoire Thierrée sent a steel sculpture into the stratosphere aboard an expandable balloon. Its form was drawn from the polyhedron in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I – that ancient emblem of creative melancholy – and it was deformed by atmospheric pressure changes on the ascent, returning to Earth bearing the marks of a journey no human witnessed. Bertrand Rigaux used the same method for a simpler, more meditative end: a camera aboard a balloon filmed a continuous monochrome blue as the sky deepened from pale to absolute dark on the approach to space. The work makes visible a colour shift that we know occurs but can never ordinarily see.

What the exhibition refuses, throughout, is any celebratory relationship with the space industry. The difference between art about something and art made within it is the difference between a postcard and a letter, and every work here insists on being the latter.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Jürg Nänni: Art & Science and L’art extra-terrestre au XXIè siècle

Through 3 May 2026 

Espace de l’Art Concret, Château de Mouans-Sartoux
Open Wednesday to Sunday, 1pm–6pm (September to June); daily 11am–7pm (July–August)

VENUE DETAILS

Espace de l’Art Concret (eac)
Château de Mouans
06370 Mouans-Sartoux

Tel: +33 (0)4 93 75 71 50
Web: https://www.espacedelartconcret.fr

PHOTO CREDITS

• Lead image on Wikimedia Commons – Vue du bâtiment de la donation Albers-Honegger dans le parc du château de Mouans-Sartoux by Art concret — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 4.0, link
• All other images courtesy Espace de l’Art Concret (eac) and as credited