Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel — Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris — Point de vue — Slash Paris

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel — La Sève et la Vase @ Loevenbruck Gallery from October 18 to November 22. Learn more If their early pieces displayed immediately recognizable symbols such as mythical vehicles, figures of musicians, or cult objects, their subjects now delight in their anonymity. They become more discreet, almost ordinary, allowing a latent poetry of matter to emerge — that which composes the landscape of the everyday. Animal figures far from exotic, such as rabbits or snails, with human limbs, from family dishes to bathroom furniture to rudimentary craft objects, this continuous shift brings statuary back to the most intimate level and transforms it into a sanctuary of reimagined common experiences. These act as a magnetic point within the duo’s visual vocabulary. Consciousness drifts into conjecture and thought experiments before a gigantic stone foot, a wooden shoe, or a leg without a torso.

The artists’ bestiary-herbarium stretches and repeats itself, marking ruptures and continuities between orders, constantly playing with astonishment and subverting any formalism of presentation. There is no echo here of the theme of ruin. The “sap” and the “silt,” the two terms in the title of this presentation, beyond their syntactic pleasure, their suave sound and troubling sisterhood, exude their power of life, whether as its expression (the sap) or its condition (the silt). It is therefore life that is at stake here.

One enters the exhibition as if entering a vibrant place, transformed into a dreamlike aquarium. Light reflects on a metallic floor, multiplying the shimmering of a vast silk fabric painted with fish and hybrid vegetation. Suspended in the air, these motifs ripple with the ambient breath and are caught by the hypnotic gleam of pink marble shells, between horn and flesh. The introduction of the woven element into their vocabulary creates a new place for the spectator who here interacts surreptitiously with the work. Through this friction and movement, the installation brings the outside into the enclosed space. The visitor, immersed in this liquid atmosphere, is swept along by the flow of sap, unless already drifting within the silt.

A dive that contrasts with the second space and its deliberately objective presentation, once again subverting the thread of an exhibition that might otherwise tend toward narrative. Always tangible, the story is never linear in the work of Dewar & Gicquel, and this rupture of tempo, even of meaning, participates in a strategy of shock that places us, each time anew, before the literally “edifying” value of sculpture. Whether unique or repeated, the work appears each time as a singular fragmentation of gaze and matter.

From the reflections and shimmering stakes of the first space, everything here becomes matte. Wood, thick fabric; the ensemble of furniture, carved wooden panels, and embroidery composes an interior as familiar as it is dissonant. One recognizes fragments of an ordinary world — an apple pie, a winter sweater, a recorder, a foot, a rabbit — but transposed into the density of wood and transformed by the investment of engaged manual labor.

Sensory memory awakens there: the knit, the crust, the flesh, the fiber — as many textures that replay our first experiences of matter. Dewar & Gicquel set in dialogue the gesture of the sculptor and that of the tailor, skill and repetition, softness and absurdity. Between sap and silt, between vital impulse and the weight of origin, the artists unfold a wordless reflection on making, on “doing” as an act of thought.

They seize the images and objects of daily life to divert them from their function, conferring upon them an almost anti-symbolic power that exceeds all narration. The virtuosity of Dewar & Gicquel is not measured by their (dazzling) technical perfection but by the tension they establish between gesture and time, between the slowness of making and the suddenness of encounter. A fish, a shell, an apple pie, a rabbit: these modest figures become mediators of a relationship to the world where realms, scales, and uses are fundamentally blurred.

In this, their work performs a kind of tautology of matter; Dewar & Gicquel make the world stutter, extracting atoms that they re-expose to other perils, other winds, other temporalities. For despite the nobility or robustness of their materials, the age-old tradition of their craft, the desire for sacredness or even immortality is far removed from this fragmentation of the perishable.

Within this circularity, the world reformulates itself — no longer as a memory of death, but as a reminder of life. A reinvented memento mori; not “remember that you will die,” but “remember that you live.”