Les flammes du renard du nord assembles translucent painted layers which, through superposition and permeability, compose a chromatic field evoking the northern lights, not to reproduce their science, but to borrow their mechanics : invisible forces that, by interacting, produce fleeting apparitions.The title deliberately refers to the Finnish toponymy revontulet, literally "fox fires", the traditional name for the auroras stemming from the folk belief that a fox with sparkling fur would sweep the snow with its tail, sending sparks into the sky.The fox, a figure of the threshold and of the cunning, traverses these layers and leaves behind traces that speak of displacement, fragility, and atmospheric memory. From a distance, the surface reads as a continuous and luminous phenomenon but up close, the gaze discovers gestures, textures, and human interventions – brushstrokes, seams, fraying –revealing the materiality that supports the illusion.Suspended between poetic metaphor and images borrowed from physics, the work questions the receding of our horizons and the way imperceptible forces shape what we call the sky.
« I would like visitors to leave with this idea : the more we know, the further the boundary of the unknown expands. Science does not dissipate mystery – it displaces it. The northern lights were once inexplicable and today we understand their physics. But what we feel beneath their light – that vertigo, that sense of being minuscule in the face of the universe – has not changed. Perhaps that is where the deepest truth lies : in that which cannot yet be named. »
Sami Korhonen
Sami Korhonen is a fashion designer and multimedia artist born in Helsinki and based in Paris. Trained in fashion design in Brazil and theater in Finland, he works at the intersection of custom tailoring, costume design for theater and dance, and visual arts. His works have been exhibited internationally, notably at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, and his collections have been presented in London.
