zachari logan — disappearances — Jeanrochdard Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 19 → December 24, 2011

After a first exhibition in January 2009, playing with the classic themes of heroism and narcissism through stereotypic masculine portrayals, Zachari Logan focuses this time on the disappearance of the body in favor of a nature that seems to reassert itself. The human figure makes one with the vegetation in the image of Logan in the north Saskatchewan (after Gros suicide in the Seine), a graphite drawing that also reminds us of the soldier lying in the grass taken from the famous poem by Arthur Rimbaud, The sleeper of val.

The neoclassical vocabulary of Zachari Logan, usually responsible for autobiographical references, used in the exhibition disappearances iconography is this time borrowed from the Old Masters. Drawings of the Midnight Garden serie are direct quotes from Caravaggio’s paintings, in which the use of chiaroscuro offers a striking contrast between the characters bathed in light and backgrounds often reduced to mere dark surfaces. Zachari Logan collects details from the night to compose a disturbing scene of a human presence hidden in the dark.

The large drawing Emperor’s new clothes, made in pastel, borrows its subject from an Andersen tale that tells the story of an emperor who cared for nothing else but his visual aspect. The end of the story is well known: two swindlers promise him, for the next procession, the most magnificent clothes, cut into tissue that only stupid people do not see. Complacent, ministers and officials are silent … and the king eventually scroll naked.

As a nod to his previous drawings — where the artist’s naked body was presented as an archetype sculptural figure — Zachari Logan covers the nakedness here by a swarm of monarch butterflies. The behavior of this species annually migrates as a group from southern Canada to Mexico is seen as a metaphor for a collective identity facing the sense of isolation felt by the artist.