Alix Boillot – Grace, 2023

In her sculptures and performances, Alix Boillot treats water, a common and universal good, as a bonding agent, an element that facilitates relationships. Working with rain, snow or ice, which she combines with other materials, she seeks simplicity of gesture, uneventfulness and sobriety of form, in order to highlight the intangible and the ephemeral. Her work is poetic; it involves rituals of giving and communion, a bonding of nature, humans and the sacred.

In the fountain at the Villa Medici in Rome, drummer Valentina D’Angelo performs Jeff Buckley’s Grace, a song that some thought was a prophesy of Buckley’s drowning in the muddy waters of a tributary of the Mississippi. Waist-deep in the water, D’Angelo brings to mind those classical sculptures of nymphs, naiads and assorted river goddesses traditionally found in fountains. But unlike those stone figures, the performer’s fleshand- blood presence anchors the fountain in the contemporary world of performance. Alix Boillot’s video work resonates with an early 3rd-century CE mosaic discovered in the northern part of the Saint-Romain-en-Gal site, depicting Hylas, companion of Herakles on the Argonauts’ quest in search of the Golden Fleece, who was seduced by naiads of the spring and dragged underwater with them.