manger les fleurs
TYPE : collective exhibition
MEDIUMS : painting, ceramic, installation, words
DATE : 2022
PLACE : art gallery SONO, Paris
SYNOPSIS :
The collective exhibition MANGER LES FLEURS includes artists Camille Dedenise, Mariana Hahn, Alice Goudon, Isaline Dupond Jacquemart, Karolina Laderska. Curation : Ainhoa Bourgeois.
Camille Dedenise exhibits an oil painted big scale triptych, an installation with earth and a ceramic, and a literary text included in the fanzine of the exhibition.
Presentation of the exhibition by curator Ainhoa Bourgeois:
“Have words and images played a part in anchoring gender clichés in our mores and, if so, which of the two media is the most effective in breaking them? If images sometimes run the risk of being seen only as illustrations of ideas, and conversely, as Kant maintains, words are empty and serve only to organise experience, to which system of expression are sentient beings more receptive? The idea of describing nature, as evidenced in some ways by the ecofeminist movement, can thus revive the debate around the insatiable Ut Pictura Poesis. Flower, fauna, woman, girl, feminine are all terms that share a linguistic, visual and aural similarity, as well as a socially constructed semantic purpose. Has a language entirely devised by humans helped to define gender clichés such as the association of “feminine” with flowers and, more broadly, with plants?”
This painting represents immaterial entities, invisible for humans. I paint blue women who represent mystical women, allegorical beings, spirits perhaps. On this image they are riding a mythological creature, a creature inhaling and exhaling a breath made of golden pigments. In this soft universe, the moon shines above. It represents a breath symbolising that something is possible on the dry and arid lands : the hope of a possible regeneration.
This painting represents a suffocating and dramatic scene : a reality. The sky is hot and burning, trees are on fire, the ground is dry, glaciers are melting. I paint blue women who represent mystical women, allegorical beings, spirits perhaps. Here, the blue woman represents the spirit of glaciers, and her golden tears are merging with the rivers made of the tears of glaciers burning. I thought, and experienced, this painting last summer, 2022, too warm and blazing, with forest’s fires and the glaciers melting. This painting was experienced last summer in the French Alps, where I live and work. The message of this painting is a warning, yet another one : the ecological urgency is real and Earth is dying.
This painting represents a group of natural entities who are protecting with their pure strength the last drop of water. The violence of human domination, of pollution and the increasing loss of ecosystems and water, is the message of this painting. The last drop of water is represented by a golden pigment, like a floating energy is the hands of this protecting spirit, an earth guardian. The message of this painting is a warning, yet another one : Water is being killed on this earth because of the humans actions.
AMPHORA:
The amphora is a clay made vessel used in ancient times to transport basic products such as wine, olive oil and garum (a fermented fish sauce). It was made waterproof by polishing or waxing, by pouring resin or wax into it. The object, made of two handles and a body, can vary in size and shape depending on the period, the origin and the use. The amphora is therefore a common object subject to an early standardisation, and one of the most widespread wastes of antiquity. The large quantity of amphorae produced, as well as the material resistance of the clay, makes it a preservable, resistant and durable object, allowing archaeologists to find a large number of them and in particular to trace the marketing circuits in the Mediterranean area and beyond. Archaeology, the science of ancient things, studies the past from the material remains that have survived. The amphora is an archaeological object par excellence, because beyond its historical charge, the amphora is a strongly symbolic object (although the historical and symbolic charges cannot be strictly separated). Along with columns and statues, the amphora is a symbol of antiquity, a symbol of a vanished civilisation, of buried debris, a symbol of a past and its mysteries. The amphora is the material sign of an imaginary around a time and a place, becoming an object-prejudice, in the sense that this object becomes an attribute, which can be illustrated with the quantity of amphorae in the souvenir shops in Greece.
From these historical, material and symbolic reflections, the work AMPHORA is created.
The purpose is the following: pollution, a tragic fact of our time, has multiple consequences, and one of them is the problem of water: melting ice, polluted water, droughts, stagnation. AMPHORA represents the capitalist relationship to water: through the exorbitant production of plastic bottles in particular, standardised and resistant, which give the illusion that natural resources are unlimited and can be stolen and plundered without question. AMPHORA represents a vestige of the present in the present: the water is already missing, the earth is already dried up. AMPHORA is an empty container because the water is running out. AMPHORA will remain buried under the earth as a memory of the drought, an archaeological object of today, following the end of our civilisation. AMPHORA embodies the evil of our time, the murder of nature. AMPHORA becomes a symbol of the agony of nature due to human domination and materially embodies an alarm, yet another : « earth is dying ».
The installation is made with earth, dead leaves, rocks, pieces of wood borrowed in a forest of Chartreuse, in the French Alps. The artist has picked these elements, leaving kind offerings in exchange. These elements of earth, leaves, rocks, wood, are returned after the exhibition to their environment of origin, in the forest, around a thank you ritual.