With a selection of artworks by:
Gilles AILLAUD / Johan CRETEN / Jules DE BALINCOURT / Giuseppe GALLO / Tim GARDNER / Dan GRAHAM / Jan KOPP / Yayoi KUSAMA / Paul McCARTHY / Marlène MOCQUET / Djordje OZBOLT / Cindy SHERMAN / Luzia SIMONS / Ruud VAN EMPEL
On the occasion of the Climate Change Conference "COP21", Samuel Le Paire Fine Art is delighted to present its new exhibition Artificial By Nature. It is an artistic dialogue in parallel with the political dialogue on the relationship of humanity to nature.
The semantic opposition of Art to Nature, from belonging to the world of culture, calls for this comparison between the natural and the artificial ; a choice that is also the fruit of an observation of the link maintained by humanity with its environment.
“What prevents humanity from achieving fulfilment is not within its nature, but comes from the artifice of civilization.”
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Humanity seems to have the need to choose and build a habitation whose walls have cut it off from the natural world; a duality between interior and exterior questioned by the minima-conceptual genius of Dan Graham and expressed in the title: Interior Space/ exterior space (1974). Does this act of withdrawal reveal the need to appropriate a territory? Or is it the expression of a fear, which would then define nature as hostile and dangerous? Two possibilities that do not exclude the constant fascination that nature exercises over human beings. Art is then created as a perpetual search for the sublimation of the world which we have created within the shelter of our worlds; a doorway towards the human mind where the frustration of this lost nature is always latent, either in the search for it or in its rejection. Thus in the psychedelic and psychological universe world of Yayoi Kusama, a dotted pumpkin becomes a form of self-portrait (Pumpkin, 1998). A theme that is important to Cindy Sherman who shows us in a quasi—mystical photography (Untitled #154, 1985) and through her disguised image, a perfect example of human artifice. An artifice rejected by Paul McCarthy who, by copulating with a tree, in a study related to the performance Fucking a Tree (1992), brings humanity back to its animal instinct and expresses this sometimes violent relationship which he maintains with nature and life. In Amazonas Path (2013), Luzia Simons has filmed her progress through an Amazon forest, like an archaeologist of origins.
These statements are enriched by works by Gilles Aillaud, Jules de Balincourt, Tim Gardner, Giuseppe Gallo, Jan Kopp, Marlène Mocquet, Djordje Ozbolt, Ruud Van Empel. So many unique views that tell us, perhaps, that humanity is Artificial By Nature.
Curated with the precious collaboration of Sarah Mourat.
