by Caroline Gaudriault
Since nature grows back whatever happens, that the things of life unfailingly follow their course, that the imponderable is a corollary to living things, since everything always starts again … there are necessary rebirths.
The vanity of men is regularly met with the repetitions of history. Their progressive will pushes them forward and it only takes one step too far or wrong for the natural laws of nature to regain their rights over a too conquering humanity, for them to try to balance the living by placing it in front of the fragility of the world and its ephemeral destiny.
The artist does not seek to change the world, he is not gifted with this power, but he translates the pulsations of his time by confronting the great universal artistic themes that he constantly reinterprets. The feeling of decadence and decline of a civilization is a reflection of a society in transition, the most fantasized of which in Western history was that of late antiquity. Is this current awareness of a new mutation again in the throes of fantasies? The world is on fire, statues fall, the desire to purge history outrages memory, ideologies impose their rights, contemporary conceptual art is pastiche and dies in its emptiness of meaning, ecological and epidemic catastrophes are taking hold of people. territories where confusion attempts to settle.
But from chaos are born roses: oleander, eucalyptus and ginkgo biloba that survived nuclear bombs. Nature always grows back.
The artistic genre of still lifes responds to a contemporary need that follows ruins. The era in search of meaning and the essential is looking for its traces in order to better engage in a rebirth. The still lifes mark an imprescriptible time symbolized by its signs and imprints that we can come back to endlessly, as a response to the temptation of Tabula Rasa and complete dematerialization.
The meticulously arranged compositions of inanimate things and vanities subjugate human desires to humility and the passage of time. With modesty, they reveal all their fleeting beauty. These objects, for the most part derisory, go beyond their primary function and their cultural references; that go seeking the depths of our innermost. They do not impose a look on what they are but invite a Proustian reminiscence of our memories, our resonances, our memory. There is no question of the thing taking power over Man, but engaging him, on the border between the real and the imaginary, towards his own motionless journey.
Caroline Gaudriault
Gérard Rancinan & Caroline Gaudriault : « Le voyage immobile, et tout recommencera… »
From January 14 to March 4, 2021
NOT A GALLERY
104 avenue Raymond Poincaré
75116 Paris
tel: + 33 (0)1 85 73 19 45
Le Voyage Immobile by Caroline Gaudriault
éditions Paradox
