“Dandy des gadoues” is inspired by the character imagined by Michel Tournier in his novel “The Meteors” and focuses on a particular aesthetic, that of a perpetual reinterpretation and degeneration of forms from popular culture, sometimes tinted kitsch.
The invited artists seize the collective imagination to invest the nineteenth-neo-Renaissance villa designed by the architect Charles Barrois (1863-1929).
They illustrate with strength, poetry and irony the hypothesis framed by this character of Alexandre Surin: “The idea is more than the thing, and the idea of the idea more than the idea. By virtue of what imitation is more than the imitated thing, because it is this thing plus the effort of imitation (…). That is why in fact of furniture and art items, I always prefer the imitations to the originals, the imitation being the original encircled, possessed, integrated, possibly multiplied, short thought, spiritualized. ”
Focus on: Sébastien Gouju who presents a long-necked flamingo himself hung, and his series “Contre-jour” realized during his residency in the glove of the Maison Hermès in Saint-Junien. A nod to the clichés of postcards that represent paradisiacal and exotic beaches.
Also in the winter garden, a wallpaper by the Canadian Sara Cwynar, who appropriates the iconography and standardization of aesthetic canons: 72 Pictures of Modern Paintings.
Erin Jane Nelson‘s enameled stoneware compositions based on archival photographs, beads, clothing, medicine boxes, shells and leaves are awe-inspiring.
The carpets with Cayetano Ferrer‘s architectural decorative motifs and the ornamental paintings, also from Nevin Aladag carpets of different origins, send us back and forth between the West and the East.
Finally, Nina Childress revisits the classical composition (diagonal structure) by incorporating frayed phosphorescent silicone pellets, with a work based on a screenshot of the documentary “Like the fallen angels of the planet Saint-Michel”, Directed by Jean Schmidt in 1978: We love it!
Artists : Nevin Aladag, Nina Childress, Sara Cwynar, Florent Dubois, Cayetano Ferrer, Sébastien Gouju, Hippolyte Hentgen, Nicolas H. Muller, Erin Jane Nelson, Southway studio (Giovanni Copelli, Andrew Humke, Bella Hunt & DDC, avec Emmanuelle Luciani & Charlotte Cosson).
