David Douard's 'Animorphs' at Les Églises de Chelles

David Douard's solo exhibition 'Animorphs' at Les Églises de Chelles, a contemporary art center housed in two adjoining churches, presents an immersive environment of hybrid sculptures, video installations, and text fragments. The show is titled after the 1990s fantasy series 'Animorphs,' which involves teenagers morphing into animals. Douard, born in 1983 and a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, fills the space with metal grids, plaster-coated assemblages incorporating cage parts, children's toys, rusty nails, and cigarette butts, as well as artificial roses. Three stacked monitors face a worn-out sofa, repeatedly showing a young woman's video chat gradually overlaid with 3D-modeled forms. Electrical wires, scratched plasterboards, and cryptic text snippets—some referencing the Animorphs series—appear throughout. The exhibition's soundtrack, a looping piano melody from a Final Fantasy game, adds an enchanting atmosphere. Douard's chaotic creative process combines disparate materials from his studio, embracing accidents and unpredictability. The works evoke a vital yet virus-ridden state, reminiscent of adolescence as a transitional phase of bodily and identity metamorphosis. The exhibition ran until December 8, 2013.