Cendrine Rovini / Jean-Benoist Sallé — Locus Amoenus — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 12 → July 24, 2014

The Galerie Da-End present Locus Amoenus, the second solo exhibition between its walls of French artist Cendrine Rovini (b. 1971), as well as Lever d’Aurore (Crack of Dawn) a carte-blanche to Jean-Benoist Sallé (b. 1977).

Filled with animist thought and a spirituality born from dreams, Cendrine Rovini’s artworks depict a pastoral and fertile world where ethereal nymphs, shape shifting creatures and an abundant vegetation congregate.

Throughout the body of works on paper, wood or sheet displayed at the gallery, the artist visually transposes her imaginary memories of the locus amoenus, this “agreeable place” described since Antiquity in the Greco-Roman literature and where the souls of the living come to rest. She therefore makes possible the access to memory’s buried places and unwinds, in the course of her brush, the complex skein of her mental landscape.

Land of a disturbing calm, the dreamed Eden she pictures is a world of the strange where unexplainable rituals and resurgences happen in secret. “These are wilder furs, constellations and multiplications of the mythical place disappearing from Earth but becoming incarnate in human and non-human imaginations,” she explains. “Nothing is as beautiful as a world collapsing on itself, letting indocile flights of life-bearing image-insects escape.”

The symbolic richness of Cendrine Rovini’s work and its eminently feminine character are highlighted by a subtle technique. Almost imperceptible, the pencil strokes fade in favor of the light washings which cover the paper with multicolor clouds. The crystalline blues, somewhere between water and sky, dissolve in the peaceful beiges. The garnet red, vector of intensity, makes its liquid way to the heart of the beings, bringing them back to life though they seem to disappear before our eyes.

Also stating interior processes and oscillations, artist Jean-Benoist Sallé invests the project room with his installation, Lever d’Aurore, created especially for this space. Thus, he inaugurates a series of in situ experimentations, through which the visitors will be physically immersed in the artwork.

Using the human body as a semiotic medium, the artist creates organic-shaped textile sculptures which symbolically expose our own interior. Playing with the visible and the invisible, or notions of the attractive and the repulsive, Jean-Benoist Sallé chooses the in-between as his field of investigation. His latest installation allows him to double up this theme with a questioning on fertility and the regeneration of matters.