Le Royaume et l’Exil — Second volet — Backslash Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 19 → December 22, 2011

Gaël Charbau is orchestrating phase two of the dual-curated Le Royaume et l’Exil [Kingdom and Exile] exhibition being held at the Backslash gallery.

Drawing on Albert Camus’ collection of short stories, L’exil et le royaume [The Exile and the Kingdom], featuring six texts that explore the difficulty of finding and experiencing happiness and a sense of completion, L’Exil strikes off in the opposite direction to the exhibition’s first urban phase, Le Royaume. It presents figurative works that speak of the existence of a possible ‘elsewhere’, of a fantastical vision of landscape, home to shadows, objects of meditation, apparitions and romantic reveries, or possibly a pictorial terrain that gives birth to natural catastrophes. Based on collages, montages, photos and images found on the internet, the featured works — mirroring Camus’ characters in their quest for felicity — propose a journey beyond the city and well-charted territories to present Nature, or rather, the way in which Nature appears, cloaked in fantasy, in the artist’s studio. The exhibition has a dream-like structure, using echoes, motions, shifts and reverberations to present the works.

“The stars were falling one by one, in front of her eyes, and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened up a little more to the night.”¹

Art critic, founder and former editor of Particules magazine and coordinator of the Salon de Montrouge’s panel of critics, Gaël Charbau brings his personal vision of modern art to bear on each of the exhibitions he curates.

¹ From La femme adultère [The Adulterous Woman], the first story in Albert Camus’ L’exil et le royaume.