Biennale de Venise 2022 — Point de vue — Slash Paris

Biennale de Venise — 2022 — 59e édition @ Jardins de la Biennale de Venise from April 23 to November 27, 2022. Learn more With a dense program and many artists combining as many perspectives, focused on a world that no longer moves solely in the direction of a Western civilization delighted to distract itself from the breaches opened by others, the actors of the Biennale, from all over the world, combine their sensibilities in an open exhibition. Driven by a tendency to hybridize traditional aesthetic forms, The Milk of Dreams multiplies its narrative threads with warmth and passion, taking the visitor on a carousel of intense feelings. From illuminated kitsch to minimal subtlety, taste and form do not constitute here the ultimate standards here ; they leave room for an emotion, an affective sensitivity which lays the groundwork for a new definition of the notion of coherence.

Leonora Carrington’s children’s book The Milk of Dreams, giving its title to the exhibition, consists of a succession of stories, sketches and ironic fables where texts and images dialogue and seem to shift responsibility in the course of a « performative » story. Sometimes descriptive, sometimes symbolic, surrealist drawings and stories inhabit a world where the laws of men are subject to their confrontation with a bestiary that supplants their reality and, therefore, their power. A lightness which deepens the confusion and widens, by its strange magnetism, a larger audience than the one which the naivety of its representation and the brevity of its developments seem to call for. Unexpected patronage for a presentation of international art that immediately evacuates any claim to artificial intellectualism. Fantasy, invention, magic, domination and injustice are experienced here, disturbing our adult minds as we remain marked by the intellectual discoveries of childhood.

Stripped of the base of rationality as much as of a mystical consensus, of an animist faith or of a religious background, the exhibition succeeds by taking all human beings into its vortex of flesh, symbols, of excess and fantasy that redistributes all the panoramas that form the basis of our expectations. Among the two hundred and thirteen artists, showing an expected current trend of an economy of means, a certain tropism for graphic arts and a reduced amount of videos guarantees an ultimately fairly wise rhythm in the construction of the course where the few formal audacities (pieces plunged into darkness, all-overs, installations, etc.) impose a subtle punctuation which contrasts with the explosion of forms and colors in the Arsenale and of the central pavilion. A figure that takes on even more significance as these artists come from fifty-eight different countries and one hundred and eighty of them exhibited for the first time at the Biennale. Beyond the esoteric food of the dream, the fundamental question is indeed to materialize a universe of which man, in his particular notion as universal, is no longer at the center.

Undoubtedly, curator Cecilia Alemani and her teams have provided rich and strangely unifying work, pushing into the arena of the Biennale a tremendous amount of talent capable of reaching audiences as closely as possible. An echo of the personal journey of the curator, who, in addition to having been at the head of the Italian pavilion in 2017 and led a project involving the ecosystem of the city of Buenos Aires as part of Art Basel Cities, has officiated for ten years at High Line Art, an art program in the New York public space anchored in the daily life of its witnesses but also within a program. But no confusion here, these audiences do not designate a sub-genre form of amateurs, on the contrary, this diversity is to be understood as the random plurality that it designates and not its degree of involvement. By abolishing temporal and geographical boundaries, levels of consciousness and degrees of attention, The Milk of Dreams gives everyone the opportunity for amazement, astonishment and charm.

All these intensities, these bravadoes in the face of the good taste of art, of the good taste of the rational and universal humanist vocation of man, participate in a celebration of forms which dismantles propriety and distillates, between the flows of singularities, an enterprise of generalized insubordination. Whether we are talking about the power of dreams, alternative realities or cybernetic ambitions that pay little heed to the principle of reciprocity, all the works presented impose their fragmentation of the exchange to turn into gifts, dramatic and paradigmatic symbols of a full and unlimited self-engagement in form, a painful fracture of the unity of the imaginary. To finally release from a multiple, plastic and infinite organism which, whether we like it or not, connects us all. The succession of works perfectly materializes the ambition of the General Commissioner to establish a “historical narrative that is not built around systems of direct inheritance or conflict, but around forms of symbiosis, solidarity, and sisterhood.”

Thus materialized plastically, the theory which governs the course has nothing of verbiage and contributes to the plastic elaboration of a course activating at each detour a new zone of the dream, a new tangible mental space which unites all the “capsules”, these areas of presentation of more historical works (from the 19th century), of the exhibition.

Oscillating from ethereal dream to dystopian fiction, from cutting-edge technology to popular folklore, from instantaneous creation to meticulous precision, this milk of dreams puts its oxymoron into practice to bring opposites, the organic and the immaterial, to life. In the magnetic intensity of their confrontation. Modes of expression thus vary from sketches to raw documentary, from hyper-realistic sculpture to the free modeling of random fantasies. Concretely, the representation appears pushed to its paroxysm and the naivety just like the “pompier” accumulation of sometimes abstruse symbols puts our relationship to the test, canceling in this visual overflow any temptation of judgment. The dead end, however, of a leveling of the critical faculty or of a nihilistic relativism is skilfully avoided and the attention paid to the hanging, to the aesthetic balance of the moments of the exhibition reflects much more a concern to enhance all the artists.

If we feared a bias on the borders of blissful admiration, we remain very pleasantly surprised by the situation of radicalism. Far from consisting only in the desire to renew the gaze, it alternates centers of concern to reside in the energy required to make them live together, to integrate them without hierarchy, stripped of all condescension. Like a reset, the curator seems to have relentlessly reinvented pure randomness, as one would reinvent the wheel, throwing into the whirlwind of centrifugal force the scattered elements grabbed by an anonymous force.

Even more than the artists invited to live in this surrealist world, the responsibility lies with the visitors to embrace this sum of possibilities, to observe these successes and the place left to failures in order to distinguish between what opens up and what conceals.