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TRACES / Works · archives · possibilities

The living
atlas.

What remains.
What transforms.
What might emerge.

Works, archives and emerging installations: an atlas of Patrick Chartol and leif.e.boman’s explorations, with music by Bohdana Frolyak.

01 — Works & archives

Six paths into a shared sensory landscape.

01 / 06

Patrick Chartol

Colorium

Colour becomes a place.

Painted transparent panels, crossed by light. As the viewpoint shifts, layers overlap, recede and reshape the space. Colorium invites us to move around colour rather than face it.

Light object · studio archives

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A possible reading · editorial interpretation

Passing through colour

Transparency changes the nature of a painting. An opaque surface stops the gaze; here it passes through one layer, meets another and returns to the first. Colorium can be read as painting unfolding in depth: colour belongs both to the painted material and to the light crossing it.

Movement becomes a way of looking. Two marks may meet from one viewpoint, then separate a few steps away. There is no need to seek a definitive image: attention rests on intermediate states, when the visible seems still to be forming. Visitors need not alter the object; their presence renews its reading.

Within TRACES, this work offers a passage between found matter and moving images. A mark is no longer only the memory of a gesture: it becomes a possibility for transformation. This reading connects Colorium with the films while keeping the light object distinct from its reinterpretation on screen.

Exhibition simulations

Colorium at the centre of a dimly lit room, surrounded by the canvas works it helped create.

Exhibition simulations 01
Exhibition simulations 01
Exhibition simulations 02
Exhibition simulations 02
Exhibition simulations 03
Exhibition simulations 03
Exhibition simulations 04
Exhibition simulations 04
Selected works — canvas prints
Selected works — canvas prints 01
Selected works — canvas prints 01
Selected works — canvas prints 02
Selected works — canvas prints 02
Selected works — canvas prints 03
Selected works — canvas prints 03
Selected works — canvas prints 04
Selected works — canvas prints 04
02 / 06

Patrick Chartol

Found paintings

The world paints before us.

A wall, a drip, a worn surface: framing reveals a composition already there. Work developed at La Traverse brings these encounters into dialogue with painting and the materials of the place.

Matter · looking · La Traverse

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Choosing what was already there

A found painting begins with a decision about looking. An ordinary surface becomes a composition when its boundaries are chosen. Drips, stains and wear need not have been made as images. Framing places them in relation: a line gains weight, an empty area becomes a pause, one colour seems to answer another.

This can be seen as an unintended collaboration between time, materials and the viewer. Rust draws a flow; green or ochre surfaces suggest other rhythms. These differences invite the three images to be considered together, without inventing a history of manufacture or abandonment that photographs alone cannot establish.

Receiving a trace before transforming it gives the journey a starting point. Where Colorium passes light through matter, Found paintings pass attention through habit. What seemed insignificant becomes a presence.

Three more found paintings
Found painting 01
Found painting 01
Found painting 02
Found painting 02
Found painting 03
Found painting 03
03 / 06

leif.e.boman

Forgotten Memories

Earth as shared memory.

The archives show a field of earth arranged in a regular constellation. Soil and the memory of missing people meet in this work; the documents also describe a translation into sound. The photograph records a past installation, not the plan for a forthcoming exhibition.

Installation archives · Singapore

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A possible reading · editorial interpretation

A multitude of presences

The installation holds two scales together: the individual fragment of earth and the field formed by many fragments. At a distance, the eye meets an arrangement; closer attention can seek differences in texture and colour. This tension between collective form and singularity offers an approach to memory.

Earth can be read as what remains of a place when its inhabitants are absent. It replaces neither people nor their histories. Instead, it makes a distance tangible: something present before us refers to what we cannot see. The regular arrangement does not abolish that absence; it gives it space.

This reading connects with Found paintings through attention to matter, while shifting its emotional weight. Here, the trace opens onto human memory. An exhibition journey between them would call for a pause: viewers leave the play of surfaces to encounter a quieter presence. This is an editorial connection, not a decided exhibition design.

04 / 06

leif.e.boman

SOIL

Listening to what has no voice.

SOIL explores the translation of material data into visual and sonic forms. This is sonification: an artistic construction from data, rather than sound naturally recorded in earth. The spectrum opens another way of perceiving soil.

Research · sonification · spectrum

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From data to experience

Moving from earth to sound involves translation. Analysis produces data; choices about correspondence then make them perceptible. The result is not a hidden voice that has simply been captured. It emerges from an encounter between matter, measurement and artistic invention.

The spectrum offers an image of this passage: differences become relationships between colours, intervals and visual rhythms. It can be viewed as a possible score rather than an exhaustive illustration of soil. The rotation added on this site supports contemplation; it is neither a live scientific measurement nor an original animation attributed to the artist.

Within TRACES, SOIL asks what remains of matter when its language changes. Earth remains the starting point, but listening opens an experience different from looking. This passage connects with Colorium: in both, matter becomes the threshold of a new perception. Different historical versions and their collaborations are not interchangeable.

A musician’s perspective · excerpts

The Earth as a voice

Sir Niels Lan Doky offers a sensory and speculative reading of leif.e.boman’s work: an invitation to imagine our relationship with the Earth.

The result is a collection of unique and very fascinating sounds that each are categorically different from one another, depending upon the origin of the soil sample that the sound was extracted from.

One can take this concept further and consider the realistic possibility that our planet itself (not just its inhabitant organic lifeforms) not only is alive, but also is affected by our actions and reacting to them and providing comments in various forms of subtile and abstract forms of communication that we are only just beginning to learn to sense, let alone to understand.

— Sir Niels Lan Doky
05 / 06

Patrick Chartol · leif.e.boman · Bohdana Frolyak

Amygdala

The image remembers the music.

The film brings together Patrick’s images, leif.e.boman’s research and Bohdana Frolyak’s music. Matter becomes movement; listening transforms the gaze. Another form of this encounter is emerging through Patrick’s exploration of a stereoscopic version.

Film · image and music

Enter the screening room
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A possible reading · editorial interpretation

Memory in motion

With film, the trace enters duration. Viewers no longer choose only where to look: they encounter appearances, transformations and disappearances. A form may persist in memory after leaving the screen. That persistence can be read as a connection between abstract imagery and the intimate experience of remembering.

Bohdana Frolyak’s music invites these images to be heard differently. The same form may feel suspended, tense or open depending on what accompanies it. Music need not be reduced to commentary, nor images to illustration: their encounter creates a third space, the viewer’s attention.

Amygdala extends the passage begun in Colorium and SOIL: matter, perception, translation, memory. Transparency can be approached as a way of layering sensations, and a trace as what survives their passage. This continuity offers a path for listening and looking, without reducing the film to one explanation.

06 / 06

leif.e.boman · Patrick Chartol

Bosnia Symphony

A space to cross, a memory to hear.

A document entitled “NUMBER ONE” presents this audiovisual installation project as “Bosnia Symphony”. Its working view imagines a dark room with a luminous field on the floor. It opens a possible dialogue between image, space and sound.

Working view · installation project

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Making room for listening

The working view shows a dark room organised around a field on the floor. This suggests an experience different from a painting on a wall: the body must find its position before an expanse, its distance and boundaries. The image opens a spatial question; it does not establish final dimensions or materials.

The title Bosnia Symphony brings a territory and a musical form together. It can suggest a desire to compose with several presences rather than impose one image of memory. The room’s visual quiet invites attention between what is seen and what might be heard, although the rendering alone does not reveal the sound content.

Within this journey, the study connects earth installations with Patrick and Leif’s audiovisual collaboration. It offers a possible space for their dialogue: the image leaves the screen to become a situation. This reading concerns the proposal’s potential, without presuming its production stage.

02 — In the making

Open directions. Not yet promises.

The next
gesture.

These proposals are research and studies. Their form, participants and conditions of production remain to be defined.

Hands and earth
01 / In the making

Hands and earth

A shared gesture.

Cast hands hold a sphere of earth. Performance archives and participatory projects extend this gesture: holding a common world in the palm. The documents credit Aicha in earlier performances and Jonna & leif.e.boman in another hands project.

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The world at palm height

The hand changes the scale of territory: what seemed immense suddenly fits within a gesture. The sphere of earth may evoke a world entrusted, offered or protected. These readings remain open; they are not presented as an artist statement.

Casting preserves a bodily form while separating it from the body. It creates another kind of trace: a presence that can be passed on, gathered with others and exhibited. In a participatory project, each hand’s singularity could resist the uniformity of a series.

This direction moves from collected matter towards a shared gesture. Attention shifts from provenance to relationship: who receives, carries, passes on? The connection with Forgotten Memories can be read on this intimate scale. A new participatory process remains to be designed.

02 / In the making

Ice / climate

Matter measures time.

Ice, earth, light and sound: the documents explore an installation in which changing matter makes climate tangible. Several versions exist, with different geographical references. They remain research directions here.

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A possible reading · editorial interpretation

Watching duration

Ice introduces a material whose state can change before our eyes. Where an archive preserves a trace, melting makes disappearance perceptible. This contrast can be read as an approach to time: keeping, transforming, losing.

An installation of this kind could invite slow attention to modest variations rather than a spectacular event. Light and sound might then give change a sensory scale. This is a reading of the project’s potential, not a description of a completed design.

This theme extends the thread of TRACES by reversing it: the question is not only how to read what remains, but how to watch what ceases to remain. Fragility becomes a question of perception. The site’s abstract diagram accompanies this reading; it is not a photograph of a completed installation.

03 / In the making

Inhabiting sound

The body composes its listening.

In Patrick’s proposed “Sound Kaleidoscope”, independent sound sources create a listening space that changes with the visitor’s position. Another direction connects seas, oceans, images and music. Two ways of imagining immersion on the scale of the body.

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A possible reading · editorial interpretation

Moving through the composition

Patrick’s proposed Sound Kaleidoscope moves composition into space. Independent sources need not produce the same listening experience at every position. Visitors’ paths can bring sounds closer, leave others at a distance and reveal new ones.

This idea connects with Colorium through the role of viewpoint, now a listening position. The work would no longer be reducible to a fixed sequence: it would be encountered in fragments, through a duration partly chosen by the body. This is a reading between two explorations, not an announcement of an established joint work.

The seas and oceans direction opens another relationship between images, data and music. The two ideas are brought together for their spatial and sensory potential, without presuming they will merge. Their connection to the wider journey is an invitation to enter perception rather than remain facing it.

03 — A meeting place

Starting with
an encounter.

The 2017 residency at La Traverse in Argenteuil is a starting point for the dialogue between Patrick Chartol and leif.e.boman. This site follows its developments across painting, matter, film and music.

Return to the immersive journey