SUPRA NATURE
Rita Alaoui, Annette Barcelo, Souleimane Barry, Alina Bliumis, Hicham Berrada, Fabrice Hyber, Franck Lundangi, Sam Samore, Uman
« At a time when the crisis of ecosystems and the climate is fuelling all the scientific scenarios in the form of crash tests of our planet's infinitesimal chances of survival in the face of the announced ecological catastrophe, a number of artists, far from sacrificing themselves to the seriousness of the ambient pessimism or to any kind of melancholic resignation, seem to emanate from this critical moment a strange creative euphoria, reminiscent of the airy and playful lightness of the Shakespearean character Ariel at the heart of The Tempest. This is notably the case of those presented by the Anne de Villepoix gallery, on the occasion of the "Supra Nature" exhibition, of whom one cannot say that they are gentle dreamers unaware of the urgency of environmental issues, following the example of Fabrice Hyber who strives to make reforestation within a garden art, one of his major sources of inspiration.
Most of his drawings are made as a sort of "storyboard" where he pastes in a jumble of sketches and annotations, like his watercolour enhanced with charcoal, which is part of a project in the form of a prototype created in 1999 in response to a public commission for the passage to the year 2000. The artist, who had just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, had planned to surround the Arc de Triomphe with a hundred birch trees, a species of tree that can withstand global warming. The creator, who has made a point of multiplying improbable alliances between the most advanced technologies and all sorts of biological phylums, imagined grafting a website onto this birch tree plantation, allowing spectators to ask all the questions as "unknown" as the identity of the soldier under the famous monument. The recurring figure of the tree in Fabrice Hyber's work serves as a paradigm for a creation based on the principles of ramification, rhizomatic proliferation, self-generation, arborescence and networks, far removed from the epinal image of a naive, pastoral nature.
Is it not another aesthetic reverie that Hicham Berrada's emblematic installation, Bloom, proposes by mixing the simplest poetic experience with the rigour of a genuine scientific protocol? The creator likes to present himself as a "regulator of energies" helping nature to accomplish phenomena in which it seems to free itself from temporal constraints. Thus, by accelerating the blossoming of a dandelion with the help of a tungsten lamp, this device makes it possible to offer a condensed spectacle in a few minutes. The artist records this in a video, of which we can see here a photograph of the starry dandelions in the dark. In the moment suspended by his installation, Hicham Berrada captures in close-up the spectacular blossoming of one of the most trivial plants, as its flower head slowly releases its delicate, cottony sphere. Half sorcerer, half scientist, he gives us the unprecedented sensation of an accelerated phenomenon that is not perceptible in real time, and is essentially magical. By linking the banal to the extraordinary, the natural to the supernatural, the simplicity of life to the sophistication of artifice, is this not a way for this Franco- Moroccan artist, recent winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, to bring back the most "contemporary" art to its ancestral magic background?
And isn't there a similar fascination for the prodigality of nature, that of "small things", leaves, flowers, stones, in the work of the French-Moroccan artist Rita Alaoui, whose two paintings are devoted to magnifying the plastic beauty of the most ordinary plant motifs? By trying to capture the effects of transparency and opacity of a plant as common as the orpini, the painter pursues her quest for an aesthetic of the "transfiguration of the banal" at the very heart of these natural objects, organic or mineral, which populate our environments without our knowledge. This approach is reminiscent of that of a landscape gardener like Gilles Clément, who is attentive to the survival of vagrant plants in the city.
Through her pictorial gesture of transforming these "little things" of nature that she collects and transforms into so many rare and singular pieces, Rita Alaoui undoubtedly invites us to remain on the lookout for this simple life at the edge of the earth, the meaning of which we have lost. Doesn't she thus summon the wisdom dear to the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, which consists in knowing how to recognise in the "almost nothing" impalpable phenomena, among the most important things of existence, such as the modulation of the colours of a plant, the crevices of a stone, the brilliance and folds of a flower?
Rita Alaoui's approach is also in line with the current practice of ecological art, which aims to collect and preserve within works or installations, in order to leave a quasi-museum memory, forms of life that are likely to disappear under the effect of the degradation of ecosystems.
Such a concern can be found in the work of Alina Bliumis, whose recent Plant Parenthood series of watercolours on wood panel, framed in velvet, can be seen here. The Belarusian-born artist, who lives in New York, had already endeavoured with Portraits of Flowers to preserve the memory of flowers threatened with disappearing forever, in a sort of "vanity squares".
In addition to the aesthetic qualities of the American artist's florarium, there are also surprising feminist and curative concerns. The Plant Parenthood series alludes to the more or less hidden ancient practice of clandestine abortion. These flowers have all been used for abortions in various countries throughout history. After the questioning of the legal and medical practice of abortion in many American states recently, the artist-activist also testifies to the possibility for women to regain control of their bodies, by rediscovering these ancestral popular medicines that allow pregnancies to be interrupted naturally. Asarums, for example, are perennials that grow in mountain undergrowth with heart-shaped leaves. They appear alongside several other abortifacients in the 12th century medical writings of the German nun Hildegard von Bingen, who herself advised abortions.
Before the professionalisation of medicine transferred power over contraception and abortion care from pregnant women and midwives to male doctors, herbal abortifacients were widely used as family planning methods. But scientists have systematically avoided studying these herbal remedies, so that there is a notorious oversight of the history of this practice. These 'rituals' have even been frequently outlawed by many patriarchal authorities. The paintings of Alina Bliumis save the memory of the grandmothers who used these medicinal plants from this phallocentric recovery process.
Moreover, they re-evaluate, by giving them an aesthetic dignity, the supposedly inferior forms of ancestral and vernacular knowledge that Western science has rejected in the contemptuous order of delusion or erroneous belief. These belonged to those modes of thought of which Philippe Descolat drew up an inventory, grouping together, alongside animism and totemism in particular, the analogism that underlies this use of medicinal plants. Mostly present in Indian, Chinese and partly African cultures, they corresponded to what Michel Foucault called 'the prose of the world' in 16th century Europe, as a set of ways of understanding the world before the advent of modern scientific rationality. Analogism made it possible to read reality by deciphering it through the recognition of a multiplicity of signs and similarities.
Franck Lundangi's paintings, in which animals, totems and colours are intermingled with floral motifs, are a perfect example of this poetics of passage and lightness. The Angolan-born artist, who has lived in France since the 1990s, offers several works that combine the subtle alchemy of watercolour and wash with acrylic pigments, the interlacing of flowers and faces.
The works of Franck Lundangi, Annette Barcelo, Souleimane Barry and those of Uman often resemble, by their spontaneity as much in their workmanship as in their personal mythology, a sort of outsider art navigating between figuration and abstraction. The lyrical universe of the painting of Souleimane Barry from Burkina Faso seems to be matched by the singular world of the Swiss artist Anette Barcelo and her strange carnival parade mixing witches, priestesses, chimeras and totems with a whole bestiary of uncertain outlines.
For all these painters, the motifs appear during the elaboration of the painting, according to its plastic hazards and the gestures that compose it, following the example of Souleimane Barry's canvas, Regeneration 3, where a cloud of bees, leaves and fruit spontaneously escapes from the skull of a character, in a real sleight of hand, symbolising the magical fertility of the painter's creative imagination.
For her part, Uman, a self-taught transgender artist, born in Somalia and raised in Kenya in a Muslim family, has been improvising a form of informal art brut since she arrived in the United States, like this large painting on wood in an unusual format, ostensibly abstract, directly inspired by seasonal changes. Like a childhood of art, his resolutely elusive "selfie" photograph carries his self-portrait in the starburst of dandelion seeds scattered by the wind; and subtly replicates Hicham Berrada's installation.
Through the works of these nine creators, true "Magicians of the Earth", and new Don Quixotes of a chivalry in search of future subjectivities, the Supra Nature exhibition thus testifies to the vitality of a diversified art-world, and freed from the borders drawn up between cultures and artistic genres, contemporary and raw, figurative and abstract, etc. It offers the viewer an ecology of the resilient gaze in a sort of happy remake of the Garden of Delights, which we can hope will not be a simple "happy ending" in the age of the Anthropocene.»
Philippe Godin May 2023
