In the 21st century, two forces are reshaping our world with unprecedented speed: the accelerating climate crisis and the rise of artificial intelligence. Facing the Challenge, the French Pavilion's contribution to this year's Malta Biennale, brings these urgent themes together through an immersive installation by emerging French artist Louis‑Paul Caron. The work extends his ongoing Fires series, where human figures oscillate between innocence, bewilderment, and quiet alarm.
The installation recalls Jacques Chirac's warning at the 2002 Earth Summit - "Our house is burning and we are looking elsewhere." Nearly twenty‑five years later, the metaphor has become literal. Wildfires have grown into megafires, and the sense of helplessness is palpable. Caron's work insists that we confront the origins of these disasters rather than merely their aftermath. It is a call to stop averting our gaze and to acknowledge our shared responsibility.
The pavilion also turns its attention to generative artificial intelligence, a tool central to Caron's creative process. Technology is often described as neutral, yet AI complicates this notion: it is both an energy‑intensive contributor to environmental strain and a powerful instrument for understanding complex systems. It reshapes our relationship with labour, with images, and with the real. Caron chooses to engage with it critically and creatively - using it not as an escape from reality, but as a means to question it.
Through a sustained dialogue with AI models, the artist refines prompts and merges visual languages until the scenes he imagines come into focus. In Fires, the landscapes echo the pastoral traditions of 17th‑ and 18th‑century Europe, while the figures evoke American realism and contemporary staged photography. The flames themselves possess an uncanny liquidity - synthetic, seductive, and unsettling. Caron intentionally preserves this slight artificiality, not to deceive but to draw the viewer in, prompting a renewed awareness of how we perceive n nature, technology, and the fragile boundary between them.
This exhibition also serves as a prelude to MAiiA - the Museum of Artificial Intelligence & Immersive Art, soon to open in Malta.
About the Artist
Louis‑Paul Caron is a French digital artist whose work explores the emotional and existential tensions of our transforming environment. Working across painting, video, and digital media, he creates contemplative scenes that evoke loss, denial, and the quiet unease of a world in flux. His practice engages with solastalgia - the distress caused by environmental change -translating it into poetic visual metaphors. Caron's work has been exhibited internationally, including at Art Basel, Seoul, New York, Milan, and Art Dubai. Trained in digital arts and cinema at the Design Academy Eindhoven, École Boulle, and ENSAD Paris, he blends classical techniques with contemporary technologies to imagine new ways of seeing and inhabiting the world.
About the Curator
Dominique Moulon is an art critic and independent curator with a doctorate in Arts and Art Sciences. A member of the French Association of Exhibition Curators (CEA) and Berlin's Digital Art Museum (DAM), he has curated exhibitions across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and online. Since 2015, he has served as associate curator of the Nemo International Biennial of Digital Arts in Île‑de‑France. A prolific writer and lecturer, he contributes to leading art publications and is the author of several books on new media art, with Art and Society in the Age of Artificial Intelligence forthcoming in 2026. He has taught at Paris VIII, the Sorbonne, Parsons Paris, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is an active member of HACNUM, France's national network for hybrid and digital arts.