Cabinet Da-End 05 — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 28 → May 2, 2015

For the fifth consecutive year, the Galerie Da-End gets together an ensemble of recent and ancient artworks, fruit of the labors of 40 artists, in order to constitute its contemporary cabinet of curiosities.

Turned into a theatrum mundi for the duration of the exhibition, the gallery space once more becomes the frame of our discoveries and immerses the visitor in a poetic and troubling world where the artists’ imagination reigns. Over the presented paintings, drawings, sculptures or photographs, a universal story about the cycle of life on Earth is unveiled. Growths, mutations, alterations: all the successive evolutions due to the natural course of things, but also to the action of man, are depicted both in a literal or allegorical way.

The selected artworks give us the opportunity to think about the beauty standards that have been established since Antiquity and whose criterion still impregnate the common thought. No sublimated bodies or figures in here, as the metaphysical questionings prevail over all idealization. Taking the opposite view to the traditionally codified representations, the artists of Cabinet Da-End 05 transfigure their subject and experiment numerous games of materials and shapes.

Object of all transformations, the living mutates and renews itself. Not a single plant, insect, rock, animal or human whose molecules resist to the passing of time, and everywhere the fragile matter disintegrates, unavoidably. The careful observation of Nature generates the unanimous admiration of men who point out the richness of its textures, colors, its biodiversity. The extraordinary physical or cognitive capacities of certain beings, that are able to fly, to see in the dark, to camouflage themselves, spark off our covetousness. Therefore we’ve tried since very ancient times to seize them, by fantasy of all-might.

From Ovide to Cronenberg, including the countless myths and tales of shamanic rites, the Cabinet Da-End 05 explores the timeless theme of metamorphosis and allows to see its multiple incarnations operating.