Flavie Audi (b. 1986) is a French-Lebanese artist, born in Paris and currently based in London. Her practice finds its point of departure within the manipulation of glass. Through its omnipresence in nearly all contemporary forms of digital devices, glass becomes a signifier of the tension between the realms of the tangible and the digital, as well as a facilitator of the disappearance of physical objects.
Glass plays a crucial part, for Audi, in contemplating a speculative utopian future world where humans create cosmic fragments and new types of landscape formations. Using the physical properties of glass, Audi highlights the duality between the real and virtual worlds. In an era of technological innovation that has seen the creation of flawless, synthetic diamonds, undetectable by man or machine, Audi questions how we experience the real.
In Audi’s hands, glass appears sometimes liquid, at others weightily solid; always, however, it gives the impression of having been formed by nature rather than human ingenuity. With the addition of iridescent pigments and curious chemical reactions created by melting glass with resin and precious metals, the effect of her glass sculptures is quite uncanny.
Audi pursues ways of expressing sensuality and luminosity creating dazzled encounters with wonder and the sublime. Her works translate the mechanism of life and light and resemble fragments of an ethereal landscape or geology. The forms and gestures found in it capture a fleeting, living energy and suggest a certain mystery, expressing the energy and essence of existence, a sense of life, hovering between digital screen and celestial body. In a dematerialised world where all is virtual and generic, her work seeks to define a new type of aesthetic and physical materiality and invites the mind to expand in the cosmological infinite.