Eschatologie — De Roussan Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 9 → December 21, 2012

If, as the Mayans seemed to predict by ending their calendar on December 21st 2012, and if in the Bible, or more generally in all religions, there is a forewarning of the end of the world, then an Apocalypse there will be! This graphic exhibition reveals the artists’ insight before the countdown clock hits zero and perhaps before the beginning of a new era.

Facing their fears, the human being feeds its fantasies with myths and legends. Before any event or prediction, a global panic tends to take place, in which everything becomes confused and unravelled. These unbalanced lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. In this collective paranoia, every event, and every human or natural disaster is turned into a forewarning of the end of the world.

Elements rage in the sublimated earthquakes of Stéphane Perraud. The tools career out of control, the tracer of Damien Marchal spits out randomly pictorial representations of Wagner Walkyries. The repetitive and nagging sound of this teleological machine is reminiscent of the war legend of the walkyries, who take the memories of these obsolete machines to the Walhalla, screaming a last rallying cry. Miguel Angel Valdivia’s cavalrymen seem to have heard the call. Faceless people spread destructive terror, on his horses that jump out of surrealist zones.

The drawings “Catastrophes” by Sandra Aubry & Sebastien Bourg smother us in an awkward atmosphere, reminiscent of certain spectacular events, emerging from collective memory. Collages, prints on tracing paper and graphite disturb and give volume to the works. Destructions are crystallized in a state of transformation, where the end of a phase or the beginning of another is one and only. The human is excluded from these representations; they seem to be the setting up an order where the living is toying with destruction and creation without any moral statement.

Lack of human life is also part of Juliette Mogenet’s work. In her “installations” of broken mirrors, architecture collapses, while harmony and destruction combine surprising the eye with a sweet brutality. Madness intervenes to break its own linearity, only a trace of its destructive path is left in that lifeless space.

The arid and apocalyptic lands of Miguel Angel Valdivia are full of speechless beings lost in a destroyed planet. Men are anonymous and faceless, sometimes executioners, sometimes victims.

In Lily Hibberd’s installation, humanity is responsible for its own decline. By reinterpreting the myth of the slave, the various pieces question the paradox between unlimited access to natural resources and the global debt of the capitalistic world.

We encounter an allegory of the end of humanity due to the total consumption of its natural and human resources.

The echoing and immaterial piece of Dominique Blais disturbs the space of the exhibition. Barely audible, the chant of the piece named “Ways” is breaking the silence, a sort of invisible Damocles’ sword, yet present. Two versions of “My way,” one by Sinatra and the other by Sid vicious, are read aloud without music and simultaneously, every speaker diffuses one of the interpretations. This is a “retrospective” of ourselves, an self analysis just before the end.

“And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain.”

Frank Sinatra