The End — Escougnou-Cetraro Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 28, 2013 → February 22, 2014

“The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it.”

A. Camus, The myth of Sisyphus.

The exhibition The End is at the crossroads between different outlooks over the frailty and ephemeral nature of existence. It is the awareness of finitude as an existential experience linked to time and space; a feeling of absurdity connected to our becoming.

This awareness can take different paths, it can come with us or get us lost. It is a question of attitude: the one who seized the absurdity can always choose whether to look at their horizon with resignation, with indifference, or with certainty.

Albert Camus describes the absurd man as the one capable of accepting life’s ephemeral nature and translating it into acceptance and creativity. The artists invited to this collective exhibition by the Deriva laboratory use this approach: to tear any negativity off the word “end”, to turn it into rebellion, irony, mystery, or lightness. This is how the ambiguous story of The end has taken shape, between darkness and light, within the inner world of each artist.

The exhibition is structured around three moments: awareness, disappearance, rebirth.

Room 1 (awareness)

Something is about to happen or has happened already. A prelude after the end, since it keeps starting over. Confronting a lost horizon and contemporary fossils, the awareness of our own absurdity. And it always starts over, like a cycle that is worn off, leaving a trace of erosion, energy, and relentless efforts at every round, like the noise of a never-ending departure. On the oxymoronic path between individuality and universality, life is seen as a breath, stardust and  cosmic discovery.

Room 2 (disappearance)

Numerous are the sources of destruction that devour time and space, twists of fate. But the path is frozen into ice, imprinted within the soil. Ancestral images go beyond the reflection over the human condition, and go towards the universal questions of a never-ending story. Disappearance becomes memory.

Room 3 + underground (rebirth)

Return, self-reflection, transition. Rebirth of a liberated conscience, the resonating body with matter, up to find the way to the aquatic origin of our ephemeral existence.