„Metaphorically and conceptually, black paste embodies not only what binds Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont to her loved ones and the cyborg plants whose portraits she creates, but also what binds the individuals represented to their own memories, their own experiences, their own existences and interdependencies. The black paste connects everything. ‘It stores the whole, the atoms that constitute the whole. It is the beginning, where we come from and also where we will return. It is the proof, the memento that no matter what we do, I have been you, you have been me and we have been this plant.’¹ Physically, on the canvas as in space, it is the cooked result of a mixture of beeswax, Dammar resin, black pigments obtained by the calcination of materials. The black paste is applied by hand around the figure in the form of plant motifs, water currents or air currents. It is thick and matte. It generates densities. On the canvas, it absorbs light – thus bodies, human and non-human, are their own source of light. The artist explains that black paste is ‘a paint for bats, for beings who see with something other than their eyes’. The black paste tells us that there are a multitude of ways to see, to remember, to feel an image, a light, an object, a body, a texture.” Fragment of the exhibition text of Julie Crenn