Max Ernst — Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger
On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of surrealism, the Jeanne Bucher Jaeger gallery envisions a display of Max Ernst’s works, featuring the plates created for the edition “Histoire Naturelle,” published in 1926 by Jeanne Bucher. While anchored in its historical context, the gallery’s proposition nonetheless reveals an artistic spirit that remains intact, addressing contemporary issues.
Max Ernst — Histoire naturelle @ Jeanne Bucher Jaeger | Paris, Marais Gallery from September 21, 2024 to January 18, 2025. Learn more If everything seems to begin here with a story of the eye, it is, as often with Max Ernst, behind the obviousness that the truth emerges. For beyond the variation on this motif, it is indeed the question of the hand, the prominence of touch, that bridges the gap to the imaginary. Created using the technique of frottage, these works present associations of materials revealed through their contact with the tip of a graphite pencil. Thus emerging from beneath, the intensity varies according to the material, and the unusual encounters between workspaces evoke as much collage as the exquisite corpse.
In perspective and always present in a smart scenography that refuses to confine the work to a system, the exhibition plays with the echoes of Evi Keller’s vertiginous painting, which also seeks to question our ability to touch. In these combustions, with intensities that are sometimes icy, sometimes fiery, the eye is confronted with doubt: is this even an image one could touch?
Moreover, these portraits of fragments point to the very origin of matter, revealing the wild complexity that simmers within every object. Beneath the hand, a chaos stirs that we know nothing about. Like a necessity defying the obvious, the two bodies of work by Ernst and Keller meet in a way of intensity and warmth that forms an aesthetic chain of troubling force.
For in this sensitive reading (in every sense of the word) of the scientific tradition of natural histories, it is the imagination that anchors itself to the objective description of reality, already affirming the impossibility of separating from it definitively. Against a triumphant positivism, Max Ernst’s art introduces a layer of complexity—that of the interpreter, influenced by his own memories, which are rightfully highlighted in the exhibition’s presentation.
Doubling the trap, Ernst adds to the reproduction an automated method that directs us back to a nature that has definitively exhausted its reality. Here, the stars are at hand, the eye drifts to the sky, the animal is mechanized, almost disguised, the plant ill-seated… The paper of the support even seems to impose its law on the tree from which it was born. All order is reversed; everything that appears, except for a majestic eye (La Roue de la lumière), rests on a precarious line, seemingly revealing in the blank space of the sheet the possibility of a whole that encompasses it, which it is up to us to discover.
If it’s not with the eye, then perhaps it’s with the finger? It’s no surprise, then, that these works were designed to be handled, passed under the hand, and explored at each person’s own pace. Displayed at eye level, untouchable, they encourage us to try, in turn, to rub this world that confronts us, to bring forth all the images that our history is willing to tell.
A children’s game that contains all the seriousness of the world; in defiance of the authoritative parental command to “only touch with your eyes,” the painter challenges physiology, armed with the authority of art, to lead us, in his wake, to see with our fingers.
