Didier Boussarie — La nuit elles tissent — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 21 → May 9, 2015

Who has never been fascinated by the beauty and extreme delicacy of a spider web? Who has never experienced this moment where the marveling changes itself into ambiguous feelings as soon as the weaver appears, energetically walking on the threads of its fatal network…? The web forms a microcosm where one finds all the world’s beauty and cruelty. The matter of this shelter-trap is most extraordinary; the spider’s silk is one of the most resistant threads there is. It devotes itself, exhausts itself to bring it out during long nights of labor: To exhaust oneself to live in silk… devouring in order to weave more and devour more. If spiders are often frightening, it is maybe mostly because the mirror they present to us is disturbing.

Into the Web

Didier Boussarie devoted more than three years of work to spiders and their fabulous webs. He nurtured Tegenaria, allowing them to practice their “art”; feeding them, observing them, admiring their « radiant » compositions… He then recuperated their abandoned works of art to pursue the creation in his own way. The webs have been stretched out in boxes, on frames — sometimes in juxtaposition with other relics from nature (rosebuds, branches, butterflies and mummified birds). They have served to cover up — as the finest of veils — photographs of diaphanous beautiful women. To create a series of frail landscape drawings, the artist darkened and densified the spiders’ silk with Indian ink. Once nature’s lesson assimilated, Didier Boussarie brought out his weave — the kind in linen and cotton — to spin on with his paintbrushes points linked to lines that meet other points and lines. In an unconscious manner, he adopted the Tegenaria’s logic that secrete points linked by threads, that in turn are reunited by attachment points. The artist has entered the web to the point where his approach to the pictorial surface has been modified: Thus, whereas the motives of his past works always kept their distances with the edge of the pictorial surface, these new paintings are completely covered by black networks. Sometimes, the background of the canvas remains white, intensely luminous, sometimes it is covered by discrete and vibrant colors that suggest a sky seen through the web, a few petals or a simple wall.

Desire

But the artist’s intention remains the same: to render a beauty that he perceives whether it is where life is beating or where breathing has stopped. His desire to penetrate, possess and manipulate this woven matter forms a way to establish a thin link to the wonder we cannot fathom. Here, there is no theory, no “ism” and no time — there is all times and a very personal attempt to consecrate nature.

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Didier Boussarie (born in 1958) has regularly been exhibited in France since the beginning of the 90s. His collaboration with the Galerie Maria Lund began in 2006. “Nightweavers” is his third solo exhibition there, after “Du ciel à yes cheveux” (From the sky to your hair) (2008) and “Arrière-saison” (Back-season) (2011). The gallery has shown his work in several fairs, including Drawing Now in Paris (2007, 2008 and 2012 as a solo show) and at the KIAF in Seoul in Korea (2009, 2010, 2011), where it was highly appreciated.

His work has been the topic of many press publications. A retrospective catalog was edited in 2011.

For this exhibition, a catalog dedicated to his “collaboration” with spiders is published.