Corentin Grossmann — La tentation du sens — Jeanrochdard Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 15 → April 19, 2014

After Cornflakes Pléiade (2009) and Notre Monde (2011), Corentin Grossmann presents his third solo show at Galerie Jeanrochdard. La tentation du sens (The Temptation of Meaning) is a series of works produced over a three-year period that follow a sinuous path between reason and intuition. The exhibition title resumes a major paradox in Corentin Grossmann’s body of work: he positions (numerous) elements in large landscapes, which gradually lose all coherent meaning the longer the one observes them, trying in vain to define is actually before one’s eyes.

If “making sense” is synonymous with “connecting”, it is surely an impossible task when faced with the reality of a world that we perceive through an overwhelming mass of images and contradictory information. Between understanding and the failure to understand (because we know all too well that it is unrealistic even to try, as there is no way we are going to succeed), Corentin Grossmann chooses to ignore our usual register, archetype and category-based approach and proposes another way of considering the world.

La Tentation du Sens combines emotions and climatic phenomena, man and beast, contemporary icons and the artist’s own personal mythology in an intriguing mixture of drawings and ceramics, which are the reflection of these troubled times. In his work, Corentin Grossmann adopts a critical posture, in particular regarding the balance of power between the so-called North and the South, between men and women and between Man and Nature.