Art Orienté Objet — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 4 → June 16, 2018

Galerie les filles du calvaire present the first exhibition of the duo Art Orienté Objet at the gallery. Since 1991, Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Laval’s artistic work has been built on a careful and passionate observation of the living things. They appeal to very different sciences like ecology, biology, ethnography or ethology, and interrogate the changing relationship that human and non-human beings have with an increasingly science-and-technology- overrun environment.

Art Orienté Objet, La fin du XXIe siècle, 2017 Installation, laine, pierres, verre Courtesy galerie Les filles du calvaire

They defend an art of immersion both for artists-researchers and spectators and offer ever-renewed scenic environments. So then, they develop an art of ground that build a pluralist form (installations, videos, photographs, objects…) from a vital or scientific experimentation.

The exhibition Art Orienté Objet brings together a series of recent, multiform works (installations, sculptures and photographs). The duo has imagined an initiatory route where ecological concerns and Shamanic visions meet to question the multiple confrontations between mythical thoughts and technological realities. Deeply politically engaged, the artists believe in a possible recovery and thus they consider the exhibition as a repairing space, a place where they can give substance to the complex relationships between man, animal and nature. The great German art historian Aby Warburg, father of Kulturwissenschaft and inspirer of iconography, is called here as a tutelary figure for the various prophetic visions arising in his book « Serpent Ritual ».

Based on a journey that he made when he was a very young man to the end of a space crisscrossed by the railroad, Warburg compares Hopi culture with one still possible expression of a contemplation space (Andachtsraum) where the link between myth and nature isn’t severed. This space is essential for him to construct a space for thought (Denksraum) and cure his time as well as his own anxiety in front of a terrible feeling : age of electricity and telecommunications can gradually change physical space until destroy it.

“He thought that electrical communication would obliterate the spiritual relationship between man and his environment, that waves would destroy the myth.”

Art Orienté Objet, Les Tambours apotropaïques ou la machine à conjurer la fin du monde, 1994-2018., 2018 Matériaux mixtes : tambours de bois, tissus, broderie, dispositif lumineux Courtesy galerie Les filles du calvaire

What is central to Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin’s practice is the genuine concern for ecology as a science which questions our living conditions, in the way Ernst Haecke approached it. What works displayed at the gallery all have in common is a specific concept of the creative process, that the art work has an ethical existence. Artisanal techniques, DIY or durability and recycling issues are taken into account as soon as the different projects are being thought of. There are few exceptions to these precepts taken from what Art Orienté Objet has turned into a manifesto from the beginning : Slow Art. Works that the artists produce require so an unreasonably long time of construction : collecting material as much as production. It’s obvious speaking about the kangaroo skeleton in the Andachtsraum installation (2014). This perfect victim of urban expansion is transcended there : its pieced together and carved skeleton embodies–once placed in the center of an acoustic and visual plan designed as a great three-dimensional ‘dot painting’–the vertigo that man’s domination over nature plunges us into.

“An art able to create a mise en abyme of madness created by our society : species extinction, science as supreme reference, poisoning and rumor.”

Art Orienté Objet, Tombée dans le Dissumba (ou Le lit des Visions), 2013 Métal, néon, verre (verre soufflé, verre étiré, verre froid), textile Courtesy galerie Les filles du calvaire