Man-Made — Carte blanche à Eva Nielsen — Dominique Fiat Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 5 → May 3, 2012

Man-Made, here is the title taken from Life magazine, who spoke in these words about the photographer Andreas Feininger “who goes to work to make his own landscape” ¹. I often return to this text, and more specifically to this sentence that sums up my opinion about the work of the maker. What interests me is the idea of creating a bedside image, a manipulation that one gives to himself, perhaps for reassurance (I think for example to the canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat called Gri-Gri). The image created, the form delivered to the world becomes a talisman, with a protective and (in)fallible aura.

Regardless of the form used, Man-Made is therefore based on the intervention. Or, more precisely, on the decisive passage from observation to intervention. Man-Made measures this passage. This acting out takes shape with Marion Verboom’s fragmented yet patchworked masses, that position themselves in the horizon and create a dialogue with Elzevir painting, made of parasite lines which hide the vanishing points. Raphael Barontini acts in this space via solid mirages, hallucinated views, half-dreams. Mireille Blanc’s paintings or trivial constellation are placed in the path as a reminiscence of objects that surround us in daily life. In this perspective, Constance Nouvel takes possession of the lures of everyday life and bends its support. Not very far away, Chloé Dugit-Gros literally modelizes the landscape and brings us back to earth, but on a friable pedestal. Catalina Niculescu concludes this wandering by offering a guide to travelers : the Modulor.

All these artists literaly take hold of these findings and twist them to correspond to their own schemes ; they put their hand on their medium to overflow and create their own landscape, like a grip on reality. Man-Made is a double horizon, born of the strength of the object or of the steam of dreams. Or vice versa.

¹ “Man-Made Landscapes”, Life, 5 July 1948