MYTHOLOGY OF THE POST-MORTAL AGE
In dialogue with aurèce vettier
FVTVRIST Magazine // Interview by Elina P.
October 2026
"Among the countless consequences of ending death, the very first, the most bureaucratic and the most quietly devastating, is simply this: they would be off duty. Their mission would stop before anyone thought to tell them why."
Seraphim are beings stationed at the boundary between one state and the next, carrying souls across. They first arrived to aurèce vettier as white entities trembling at windows. The word itself came later, repeating in his dreams before any image attached to it. Only when he read the biblical description, the six wings, the eyes covering the whole body, did he recognise what he had been seeing.
Never running out of work, gently escorting souls out of the world of the living, creatures of habit. In this series they find themselves off duty. Paul Mouginot, who works under the name aurèce vettier, follows the logic of our age all the way through: if the initiatives now underway actually succeed and people simply stop dying, the souls stop departing, and with them goes not only the seraphim's mission but existence as we know it, with its finality and its weight.
It is a premise he approaches from philosophy and theology rather than from science, and the figures that result are unexpectedly tender, unexpectedly vulnerable.
The exhibition at Galerie Darmo brings together tapestries made in collaboration with Vincent Gicquel, a monumental high-relief, and a 120-kilogram bronze cabinet gilded with palladium leaf, its forms 3D-printed from images generated by his own algorithms and its doors set with pietra dura panels depicting comets, satellite constellations, a levitating black cat. Inside it, among other secrets, he has hidden a 1742 edition of Fontenelle.
Fvtvrist met aurèce vettier ahead of Off-Duty Seraphim, opening at Galerie Darmo during Art Basel Paris.
aurèce vettier
seraphim in Tinos looking after a very intelligent black cat with five legs as a red moon rises
Hard stone marquetry (agate, malachite, quartz, etc.) on black marble base.
Mounted in a custom-made steel frame, 2026
60 cm x 40 cm
© Courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition begins with a striking premise: what happens to angels when people stop dying? At what moment did this stop feeling like science fiction and start feeling like a plausible artistic question?
Defeating death is a very ancient motif. Today, the pursuit is real and openly documented. Bryan Johnson spends millions a year, publishes his data, treats his own body as an experiment: mortality stops being a fixed law and becomes a problem someone is trying to solve from many different scientific angles.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king crosses the waters of death to find the plant that restores youth, and loses it to a serpent on the way home. Homer tells us the opposite: Calypso offers Odysseus immortality on her island, and he turns it down, choosing to sail home and die a mortal among the people he loves.
Here, the longing and the refusal of death are both more than four thousand years old, and they already contain everything, that we want this, and that we sense the cost of it.
Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, imagines a man slowly realizing our sun is only one star among countless others, that our world is neither the center nor the whole. What vertigo for his times! It feels to me that defeating death is that same vertigo turned inward: the fixed point stops being fixed.
I own two editions of that book, and I hid the most precious one, a 1742 edition, inside the cabinet-sculpture shown in this exhibition, along with many other secrets.
Defeating death is a very old story finally coming true -this is my starting point.
1/ seraphim mourning and attempting to extinguish the fire of Notre Dame, 2026
35 cm x 28 cm
.
2/a young seraph and a white borzoi with a pink leg startled by the Betelgeuse explosion while a constellation of satellites crosses the sky, 2026
35 cm x 28 cm
© Courtesy of the artist.
aurèce vettier
seraph at the end of time
© Courtesy of the artist.
Longevity research is usually discussed in biological or technological terms. Your response is theological. Why did you choose to imagine the consequences for heaven rather than for humanity?
Removing death from the equation doesn't just extend life, it literally breaks a cycle, and I've spent years imagining what happens when this cycle breaks.
Death is the engine of renewal for our world. It clears space, forces succession, gives weight to time. Wallace Stevens wrote that "death is the mother of beauty", and we could say he's right in an almost mechanical sense: the ripe fruit, the butterfly resting on a branch in this particular morning, are precious because they end.
The ancients understood death as one turn of a great wheel, Persephone descending and returning, the seasons, the myths of eternal return. Remove death and there is no paradise to reach; life just becomes a machine with its governor torn out. Borges writes in The Immortal that among the deathless, every act loses its weight, because everything can be repeated, undone, recovered. Nothing is irreparable, so nothing quite matters, right?
For centuries, humanity has been ruining cycles: ecosystems, animal populations, the climate. Those ruptures happen in our world, and we have now started to pay heavily for them. But defeating death would break a cycle that doesn't run only through our world. It runs through higher dimensions we cannot understand.
In nearly every tradition, there are beings stationed at that boundary, the ones who carry souls from one state to the next. They wear different names in different cosmologies; I call them seraphim in my work. Among the countless consequences of ending death, the very first, the most bureaucratic and the most quietly devastating, is simply this: they would be off duty. Their mission would stop before anyone thought to tell them why.
Approaching it through heaven lets me talk about loss without talking about science or rationality. The theological angle I took, if I’m truly honest is an emotional angle in disguise.
René Daumal, whom you refer to often in your work, wrote about a mountain that exists but remains inaccessible. Your work often seems occupied by similarly impossible places: worlds that obey coherent rules yet remain permanently out of reach. Does Off-Duty Seraphim represent this kind of threshold too?
Yes, though I'd put it carefully: I don't really build these worlds, I try to approach them, to interpolate toward them, to get a small grip on something just out of reach. I think a lot about Borges these days -in The Circular Ruins, a man travels to a ruined temple with a single purpose: to dream another man into existence, detail by detail, and send him into the world. He succeeds, and ends up loving the dreamed man almost as a son. And in the last lines he understands, as flames pass through him without burning, that he too is being dreamed by someone else.
There’s a real chance we live in a reality nested inside another, a world one layer removed from ours. My cat Kotek lived all his life in my apartment. Sometimes, we travel to my hometown in Savoy and during the trip, it’s obvious he doesn’t understand the successions of landscapes or objects he’s facing. It’s another dimension to him.
Of whom, of what are we the cat?
Anyways, the seraphim arrived the way most things do in my work, through dreams.
First, they were simply white entities, trembling at windows. When I woke up, I would call them ghosts, with all the unease that word carries. They appeared in Circular Ruins, then more fully in le travail des rêves, and eventually were encountered in the large tapestries shown at the macLYON in 2025.
Only later did the word itself, "seraphim", begin appearing in my dreams, repeating, before any image attached to it. Angel-related synchronicities kept multiplying around me; a close friend named her child Seraphina. When I finally read the Biblical description, the six wings, the eyes covering the whole body, I realized these were the beings I'd been seeing all along. off-duty seraphim marks the moment I decided to stop calling them ghosts and finally tell their story.
My exhibitions tend to narrate tipping points, thresholds where one state gives way to another. This one is no exception and sits on the largest threshold I've approached: the one where death itself becomes optional.
A stone stores information. Millions of years
of pressure, chemistry, and accident
are recorded in its veins. Data is pretty much
the same:a vast sediment of recorded reality.
The sky in Off-Duty Seraphim contains two moons. It's a small gesture, yet it immediately tells us the laws of the universe have shifted. What role does cosmology play in your work?
Cosmology is one of those rare words that means three completely different things depending on who says it. For the scientist it's the study of the physical universe, its origin and shape. For the philosopher it's the structure of reality and our place within it. For the theologian it's the ordered heavens, the ranks of beings between us and the divine. I'm genuinely interested in all three, and I refuse to choose between them, as I refused to choose when people told me that I had to choose between literature books and topology theorems.
My passion for cosmology comes from childhood, as my strongest early memories are deeply bound up with space and science; it's what I first set out to study, before I became an artist. When I was eight, I read a book about space that mentioned "le fond diffus cosmologique", the cosmic microwave background, the faint afterglow left over from the beginning of the universe. I was amazed twice over: by the strange beauty of the name, and by the images of that diffuse background, this ancient light quietly filling everything. I think I've carried those images my whole life without knowing it. If you look at the skies in my tapestries, that fond diffus is there, together with uncanny atmospheric phenomena that don't quite obey our physics. And below, on the ground: seraphim, butterflies, forests.
The philosophical and religious cosmologies layer on top. The two moons are the clearest signal for me, it's a tiny gesture, but the instant you see a second moon you know the laws have shifted, that you've crossed out of our universe into one rewritten by a single rule.
I borrowed it partly from Murakami, whose 1Q84 uses two moons to mark the passage into an altered world. Thus, scientific cosmology gives me the fond diffus and the physics; philosophical cosmology gives me the sense of another world in resonance with our own and religious cosmology gives me the seraphim standing in the ordered heavens.
aurèce vettier
seraphim levitating with a very intelligent five-legged black cat while a constellation of satellites crosses
the sky as the world enters into resonance, 2026
© Courtesy of the artist.
Yellow Fever, 2025. Photographic self-portrait.
© Courtesy of the artist.
Roger Caillois believed that stones almost dream, that patterns in minerals resemble images before human imagination recognises them. Your AI models also search for latent forms hidden inside enormous collections of images. Do you see a philosophical continuity between geology and machine learning?
It could be one of the main founding intuitions of my whole practice. As a child I was obsessed with two things at once: stones and computers. I used to assemble my own computers from parts I'd salvage in scrapyards, riding my bike out to them to dig through the piles. In the mountain, I'd hunt for interesting stones, break them open, and arrange them into a collection, I even coded a small piece of software to catalogue that collection when I was nine. So, the marriage of mineral and machine isn't a metaphor just I came across as an adult.
Years later, quite recently actually, there was a wonderful Roger Caillois exhibition in Paris that struck me deeply, and it met a fascination I'd carried the whole time, fed by my gallerists and by long friendships and conversations with the Gismondi and Kugel families, who taught me to really look at opus sectile panels, at paesine, at the minerals that reveal almost photographic details.
A stone stores information. Millions of years of pressure, chemistry, and accident are recorded in its veins, and a skilled hand can read that, cut it, and carry it all the way up to high jewelry. Data is pretty much the same: a vast sediment of recorded reality, and inside it, if you know how to look, are patterns and forms and ideas waiting to be uncovered. Both are archives of latent images, and in both there's a deep role for chance, the motif you find in a cut agate and the form that surfaces from a model are both partly the product of randomness, of accidents no one designed.
However, there's an asymmetry I find beautiful and a little unsettling, and it's really the subject of my pietra dura panels. Data is fragile. It can be lost, corrupted, made unreadable, and it's completely inaccessible without electricity. A stone will outlive all of us, indifferent. So when I project an image into a hardstone panel, I'm transferring a visual from the most fragile medium we've ever built into one of the most permanent -decades of direct sun on the pietra dura panel won’t change its colors the slightest. I always like playing with those temporal registers, that’s why I also work with metal or tapestry. And yet these panels are also anchored in our contemporary era: they depict satellite constellations, the computers on which seraphim train their own CLIP+VQGAN AI models, rockets landing vertically. Ancient stone, holding images of technological artefacts.
aurèce vettier
seraph watching over a black cat or the other way around $as the world enters into resonance
© Courtesy of the artist.
Galerie Darmo has championed your work since 2021. How has that dialogue with the gallery shaped the ambition and scale of this exhibition?
Darmo has represented me since 2021, but beyond representation it's really a story of friendship. We’ve grown up together, fueled by a shared and deep passion for art, for craftsmanship, for cutting-edge technology, and for telling stories. There's a lot of enthusiasm and joy when we work together. So many of our projects begin with someone saying "oh, it would be so fun if we managed to do this…" and then we find ourselves actually pulling it off. This exhibition has a lot of those sentences buried inside it. And because the ways of sharing art are changing so quickly, a great deal of our energy now goes into finding new, meaningful ways to share the work, not only reaching new audiences and institutions, but deepening the conversations with the collectors and friends who have been with us from the start. The scale of off-duty seraphim comes directly out of that shared enthusiasm. It's the most ambitious project we've made, because we kept daring each other toward it.
The clearest example is homecoming, the large high-relief at the heart of the show. A character is crossing a forest, meeting a seraph in the air, five birds, impossible plants, two moons in the sky, burning Notre-Dame, an entire world condensed into a single surface. Fragments of that same imagery reappear throughout the show, echoed in the tapestries made in collaboration with Vincent Gicquel, hidden inside the cabinet, so that the homecoming works almost like a memory the other pieces keep referencing.
It's the kind of object we could only attempt because years of trust made the ambition feel natural rather than reckless.
aurèce vettier
seraphim carefully observing corten steel sculptures in the desert
as the world enters into resonance
© Courtesy of the artist.
If Off-Duty Seraphim imagines the first mythology of the post-mortal age, what question do you hope visitors leave the exhibition carrying with them — and which answers do you take with you into future projects?
I'll give you a radical answer, because it's the honest one. Once the works leave my studio, they're loaded with everything I put into them, the algorithms, the ideas, the narratives, the craftsmanship, the finish, but they're already not mine anymore. So I hold no hope for any particular question, as I let that go.
I plan to visit my own exhibition incognito and talk to the people looking at the work, without telling them who I am. In the past this has given me some of the most moving moments of my life: complete strangers telling me intensely personal stories, things that stayed with me for years. Will it be different with this show? For the first time, I'm talking about death, but in a way that's almost playful, which is strange, because there was never a moment in my own life when I felt lighthearted about these questions of balance and ending. So I'm curious, in a way I can't yet name, to listen to what people do with all that.
You've built a world where death has been designed out. Once you've imagined the end of endings, what's to imagine next? Is there a dream project you haven't been able to realise yet?
I should say that my work isn't really organized into series. It's closer to a continuous attempt to describe a world that resonates with our own, discovered step by step, as if I were walking through it on a hike that will last until I die. And I don't really plan the route. I was literally crossing a forest when I understood that the luminous creatures I kept meeting were seraphim, and so I decided to take a small side path and follow that thread for a while: who are they, where do they go, what happens to them now?
So my honest answer to "what's next" is for me embarrassingly simple. The next step is to go to sleep. And the morning after, if I wake up, if I'm still alive and if the dreams were interesting, I will let them guide me further along the way. To feed those dreams I try to live as many real and interior adventures as I can, spend time with people who know things I don't, discover new fields, connect with animals and be in nature, and then trust the process.
Alongside the paintings, you're introducing a cabinet. What drew you to that territory?
This cabinet is a 120-kilogram sculpture in bronze gilded with palladium leaf, its shapes and reliefs 3D-printed from AI-generated images made with my custom algorithms. Its doors are set with two pietra dura panels depicting a comet and a black cat levitating with seraphim in the mountain, with a train of satellites in the night sky. It's the third cabinet I've made: the first was in pear wood with bronze feet, the second I made with Gilles & Boissier and showed at the Musée des Archives Nationales.
What draws me to cabinets is that they are useless and essential at the same time. A cabinet is a kind of tabernacle for secular people, the place where you're meant to keep your most precious objects, or maybe a single poem, or a letter from someone you loved. Or maybe nothing at all, just air, loaded with memory: a cabinet empty like a saint des saints. Such an unusual object that researchers from the CNRS -the French National Scientific Research Center- came to the foundry while we were assembling it, to document its creation for papers on AI and craftsmanship.
It's a superlative work in the way it has to be imagined, the result of many trips back and forth between cutting-edge algorithms, personal stories, and rare craft techniques stitched together in a very complex execution.
What's the question you've always wanted to be asked, but never have?
Everyone asks me about the inspirations, the tools, the process, the concepts, and I love answering those questions because I mostly work alone and it’s wonderful to share with people. But no one asks what genuinely unsettles me about my own practice, which is the timing. I often dream a very specific detail, a particular object, a gesture, a configuration of light, and I put it into a work without overthinking it, because it feels like the right thing to do at this particular moment in the studio.
And then, sometimes months or years later, that exact detail appears in my life.
It's a deeply strange feeling. Perhaps I was not remembering the future but rather just learning to notice what was always about to happen. In this case, it would be the clearest expression I have of what I call the light that is not seen: a pattern that's already present, somewhere in the background. How much of what you think you're inventing is simply what you haven't lived yet?
aurèce vettier
seraphim at the heart of an unlikely combination of spectacular atmospheric phenomena and synchronicities as the world enters into resonance
© Courtesy of the artist.
About aurèce vettier
aurèce vettier is an art project founded in 2019 by Paul Mouginot (b. 1990).
The alias, generated through an algorithm, embodies a collaborative, open, and hybrid approach—one that blurs the boundaries between human intent and machine-generated possibilities.
At the core of aurèce vettier’s practice lies a constant back-and-forth between two intertwined dimensions: a sur-nature and a sur-réalité. The sur-nature emerges from algorithmic explorations of organic forms—particularly in the Potential Herbariums series, where AI generates impossible flora trained on millions of botanical specimens. These spectral plants, transposed into oil paintings, bronze sculptures, and tapestries, question our contemporary urge to digitize, sanctify, and ultimately erase nature. Despite vast training datasets, artificial intelligence struggles to replicate the adaptive logic of living organisms, producing instead a fragile, self-destructive ecosystem—an “anti-Darwinian” nature akin to the dreamlike landscapes of Mount Analogue, the unfinished philosophical novel by René Daumal.
Parallel to this, the sur-réalité explores the subconscious as a space for AI-driven creation. Since 2021, aurèce vettier has developed and trained custom AI models on personal archives—childhood photographs, family records, digital traces—to generate dreamlike visual compositions based on his waking recollections. This fusion of personal memory and algorithmic reconstruction has led to le travail des rêves, a body of work that materializes through various craftsmanship techniques, including painting, sculpture, bas-reliefs, and textile-based mediums such as tapestry.
Rather than treating AI as a tool, aurèce vettier approaches it as a collaborator—an entity that introduces rupture, anomaly, and poetic accident into artistic creation. By continuously shifting between computational processing and material experimentation, his work extends a lineage of generative art while questioning the limits of artificial intelligence itself.
Poetry remains the backbone of aurèce vettier’s entire approach, from his early AI-assisted poetry book Elegia Machina (2019) to his sculptural and pictorial practice today. Whether through algorithmic distortions of language, landscapes, or memory, his work operates at the threshold between the known and the unknown—forever navigating the space between human consciousness and the machine’s alien gaze.
aurèce vettier
© Courtesy of the artist.
