L’objet surréaliste — Galerie Loevenbruck
Because it both draws from and reinvents the thread of it without ever fully merging with it, the work of the artists presented in the exhibition L’Objet surréaliste at the Loevenbruck gallery offers a joyful, cheeky, and insightful celebration of the historic surrealist movement, perhaps its most beautiful contemporary homage.
L’Objet surréaliste @ Loevenbruck Gallery from September 20 to November 9. Learn more This presentation shares with its great predecessors a creative energy that no preordained law or order seems to dictate. Brain knots, automatic flows, playful fetishization of the fetish—each artist’s work weaves a wordless narrative of touch, fantasy, and extrapolated sensitivity.By focusing on the object and embracing the existential threat it poses to the supremacy of the “subject,” the exhibition brilliantly addresses the question of legacy, bringing together perspectives whose uniqueness happily converges here. The bizarre remains bizarre, even if it is never quite the same; the organic harbors mysteries to which each sensibility can offer its own response.
In the details, in the additions, ideas burst and explode, unexpected. The best example of this being Shadowshow, Le tombeau de Socrate, a stunning painting by Philippe Mayaux, which endlessly multiplies perspectives and reverses interpretations, slipping through each form the possibility of another. From Plato’s well-known allegory emerges a complex and teeming vision, expanding it with new dimensions; the reversal of what it conceals. Reality, naturally, becomes a springboard for a more complete form of realism made up of our fantasies, feelings, and doubts. Thought unfolds in fragments, or rather in sparks, carving openings into the walls toward impossible worlds or allowing beings from another world to sprout directly from those walls. The inside and outside blur, engaging both historical interpretation (the tomb of the historical Socrates) and mythology (the cave), movement and permanence.
This resonates beautifully with an earlier installation by the same artist, equally intense in its power—a cabinet of his own curiosity regarding forms and facts, compiling a multitude of abstruse objects with an incandescent charm. Everything here is about touch, about projecting oneself and others through a display case that both magnifies them and denies direct access to them.
By way of detour—if not outright diversion—a path is drawn toward dialogue with these prestigious ancestors; hence the joy here of turning one’s head from right to left, from top to bottom and back again, often within the same work, ultimately losing oneself each time in a blend of inside and outside.
A perfect example of this is Ashley Hans Scheirl, who offers a canvas brimming with exuberant excess, a golden excrement floating majestically amid an upside-down composition where the painter’s eye becomes an actor in a game that is as graspable as it is accommodating of the incomprehensible (Eye as Painter). Humanity is no longer at the center of the game, whose form, abruptly simplified, serves as a model for the emergence of shapes that transcend it and go beyond their frame. The humanoid body, in Jakob Lena Knebl’s Thorsten, becomes merely a pretext, a motif, for its own decline.
Even within the hollow of a massive jar, conceived by Dewar & Gicquel and standing on the ground like the openings of wells—places of social gathering and imaginary projection—there are muscular bulges, gleaming with a fabulous sheen, combining preciousness with rusticity, blending the body with the vegetal to return it to what it is: a fragment of matter that the world, like the snails already climbing it, is ready to colonize.
Touch and prohibition, two notions staged by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, who confronts a monumental sculpture with his painted collages. On this Hand of the Devil, humanoid figurines cling and rest in contradictory poses, from the victory of a Judith ostentatiously gripping the head she has just decapitated to a revue dancer surrounded by men about to be hurled into the abyss. The play of gazes (when the characters even have eyes) leads us toward tangled perspectives. Like elements placed on this exquisite corpse’s hand, the protagonists form a free composition governed more by experience than by strict rules.
The organic and vegetal, behind the wall, uproot themselves to evolve freely toward a desire for form. For the object, like any choice, isolates and exposes to the viewer that particular detail that will disrupt the order of things and invent its own. A fruitful and unexpected dialogue once again emerges between the shoe-wearing trunk of Chloé Royer, the oral flower of Alina Szapocznikow, and the vegetal crown of Virginie Barré. Ornament and nature communicate directly, combining to encourage the viewer to use the world as one uses inspiration.
With a blend of necessity, loyalty to its artists, and opportunity, the exhibition oscillates between depth and joyful spontaneity. A risk and audacity that exquisitely resonate once again with the methods and tricks of a surrealism always inclined to upend foundations. And fundamentals.
