La Forêt s'en vient — Pop-up Exhibition
5:30pm to 8:30pm
La Forêt s’en vient II is not a landscape exhibition. Quite the opposite. You will find some trees in the show, but the Forest here represents more of a mood, an atmosphere, a feeling. Landscape is nature tamed by human beings. It is the garden, the photograph, the painting of a wild place composed and framed to appear pretty and reassuring. The Forest is not reassuring. It is mysterious, strange, and threatening. It’s where witches and druids find the ingredients for their magic potions. It’s where outlaws and the living dead roam, where heretics and magicians convene, where ninjas and thieves go to hide. If you wander into the Forest and happen to cross its denizens, you will find beings that are at once to right before your eyes and somewhere else completely. They are everywhere and nowhere; singular and plural; they arouse laughter and fear at the same time. The Forest is where strangeness lives and breathes.
What is strange is also threatening. What is threatening is also what is possible, and what is possible remains riveted to the state of what-is-happening. The only thing that is certain about what threatens us is its unpredictability and the feeling that it is coming. Everybody believes that the Forest is stuck in place because its trees are rooted, but as soon as we understand it as a multitude of tiny occurrences—dark happenings whose protagonists come out of themselves or disappear from bodies seem oddly unchanged—the woods begin to outgrow their edges, reaching into people like you and I with its elusive presence. I would like to explain this to you more clearly, but it seems to much of an abstraction, nonsense. A way has to be cleared for the inevitable, even if it never comes to pass.
La Forêt s’en vient II is a series of paintings peopled by characters that behave absurdly and whose relations seem out of sync, generating from time to time feelings of uncanniness and the grotesque. The characters, taken from a variety of sources, are arranged in the picture in a manner reminiscent of collage. The disjointedness of each of their postures is thus amplified, further veiling the meaning of the work.
Intention
All of my work in painting stems from the sensations produced by pictorial properties and by the body’s non-verbal expression. In the process of pursuing these two axes of interest, I create scenarios in which the grotesque appearance of human beings inspires laughter.
While the idea of the monstrous refers to the physical hybridization of the body (mixing human and animal parts), the grotesque is characterized by the hybridization of characters and manifests in behaviour, rather than in physiognomy. Like the grotesque, my work reveals a range of paradoxes: between the physical appearance and the psyche of characters; between the use of paints that insist on their presence, on one hand, and the work of representation on the other (or the sense that something is constantly being disturbed by the material reality of the painting); between drama and comedy.
The ridiculous demeanour of the characters, their hammed-up behaviour, suggest that something distressing is being disavowed. It is this denial that most interests me, leading me to the science of lie detection based on attitudes and gestures.
This is why the exploration of the traits of non-verbal expressions matters, because even if my pictures are peopled by representations, the faculty of empathy that is common to all of us allows us to see, not troubled people or rampant denial, but to experience a very real relationship to the other—a face-to-face encounter that, far from being transparent, appears as an obscureness that will make you laugh with discomfort.
