Une nature moderne — le Crédac, Ivry
With both formal and practical coherence, the exhibition A Modern Nature at Crédac draws from the garden, the forest, and our environment the very reasons for invention. The whole presents a poetry of the earth, a delight in seeing layers stack upon one another, artifacts rise like organic forces, and in gathering, as close to us as possible, the fruits of creation.
Without falling into the trap of essentializing nature or our relationship to it, curator Claire Le Restif unfolds a moving portrait of the many ways of inhabiting it, once again grounding the inseparability of art and life in experience and experimentation. Here, observation, science, belief, and ritual intertwine and entangle, bypassing any relativistic leveling. By multiplying differences, the sequence of works plays with the ever-renewed possibility of stepping aside, of taking a parallel path, however winding the adjacent line may be.
Rugged and irregular, the surfaces of the works create a sensory analogy with the crevices of a reality indifferent to our gaze. Each artist present here is marked by a practice intimately embedded in the conditions of their life. With a compelling clarity—Pierre Joseph’s flowers, whose raison d’être lies in the synonymy of his name with the famous painter—light up the walls and contrast strikingly with Lin May Saeed’s raw sculptures. Shimabuku’s strange, shamanized landscape, composed solely through the rearrangement of nearby elements, echoes the negative of Derek Jarman’s garden images, where the plants and flowers seem almost transplanted.
The forest becomes a palette, its branches, stems, and fragments composing dreamlike flora in the hands of Léa Muller & Sophie Kaplan, while Daniel Steegmann Mangrané merges the animal breath with the vegetal, transforming logs into sentinels of a nature that now keeps watch, ever alert.
Never losing sight of a certain distance from our own gaze, the attitudes and modes of being with nature—while touching on an essential aspect of our lives—most often rest on a careful balance that never loses its sense of humor. Traps, trompe-l’œil, and incongruity come together in many of these works, unsettling our own certainties.
The dynamics of invasion are blurred. Just as foxes take over Brussels in Simon Boudvin’s video, the abundance of birds and fish in a tapestry made from a canvas by Suzanne Husky overshadows human attempts to implant themselves or harness natural energy. Wind turbines stand as barometers of a natural force that may be encroached upon but is far from tamed. Nature, in turn, transforms itself—and even (dare we say) becomes human—by camouflaging, as in Tony Matelli’s bronzes that perfectly imitate unwanted overgrowth, as naturally as cement on the ground.
Guillaume Aubry too invests his life in the experience of the forest and conceives, through his engagement with time, a life that makes manifest all those surrounding it. Reactivating George Sand’s personal thought and struggle to preserve a forest, he sheds light—within the exhibition—on an unexpected reference that speaks volumes about the subject’s unsuspected breadth. Everything around us becomes a motif; every element contributes to creating a potential tool of resistance. So it is with the artifacts of Sylvana McNulty, whose variety invents a new organicity.
More than the end, it is movement that matters here. Echoing the poetry of Gustave Roud, the video by Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton extols a horizontal wandering, stripped of the fantasy of the spectacular in explorations or vertical hikes. In parallel and as a continuous thread, David Horvitz’s journey of a volcanic stone—from a California ravaged by flames to Jarman’s sanctuary, flanked by nuclear power plants—sustains this logic of productive wandering, a gesture that, though rooted in nature, is firmly inscribed in modernity and in the present it offers us.
A Modern Nature thus places emotion and the human at the heart of its concerns. The entire practice becomes the rationale of an artwork that ultimately reveals a reversal of the concept of nature—so often reduced to a place of refuge—when so many artists demonstrate, by seizing its vitality, the resistant dimension of respecting its force. A true power that can only unfold when we relinquish the fantasy of control; an absolute force that asserts itself without domination.
