Claire Decet — tout un monde lointain — Jeanrochdard Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 23 → July 28, 2012

The academic shape taken by the work of Claire Decet appears to be renewing with a certain classicism. Still life, landscape study, or curiosity cabinet compose her repertoire. In keeping with the tradition of these founding themes of art history, her practice, slow and laborious, gives back to time its cohesive force in the development of the work. It is a quiet opposition to the world fast-paced rythm whose "runaway" leads to a disconnection from reality. Franked reality or root of a contemporary form of anxiety. 

The concern is there, coming along with an awareness in the work of the artist, who has for daily settin, a nuclear power station. The Centres de production éléctrique nucléaire series plays on tiny variations of the pattern of clouds produced in alternation by the four chimneys of the station. Alteration produced at the rate of the official closures for “maintenance” . This serie expresses the feeling of repetition felt in front of this view seen several times a day. This series of study on the landscape acquires a certain gravity by the presence of the neon _2052_ which announces the extension of the power station of Cattenom’s period of exploitation.  While in the countryside, the intrusion of random constructions raised in the middle of vast and flat territories, catches the eyes as well as reduces the space of surrounding nature, in town nature seems this time appropriating the urban space. Flower pots, window boxes, but also the undesirable and bad plants proliferate.

There is a certain melancholia in the Misères series, where the pattern repetition evokes the standardization of the plants arrangement recreated by urban residents. Walking through the city of Berlin during a residency in 2009, Claire Decet develops a sensibility to this domesticated nature, calling it  "inner landscapes". Landscapes recomposing worlds on window sills or in shop windows.

Begun several years ago, _Collection_ composes a kind of herbarium of dried flowers staged with makeshift vases. A neglected vegetation, a sluggish, dry nature, which seems to recreate a landscape in reduced scale.

Accurate observer of these phenomena, Claire Decet puts a glance on these questions. She reveals us the disturbing beauty hidden in the visible darkness. Landscapes of nuclear power station, abandoned vegetations, her topics are treated with a quite particular melancholy. Her colorful, neat and smooth from appearance reveal all the fragility of our societies.