DUMONTEIL Contemporary is pleased to present Vertige (Vertigo), a group show in the continuity of itsartistic program, in which each year the gallery presents an exhibition focusing on a particular colour. Afterblue and pink, this year is dedicated to GREEN.
Green is the color our eyes perceive the most shades of. When humans were hunter-gatherers, this trait allowedthem to discern predators amidst the dense foliage of humid forests. Green obviously brings to mind Nature.Vegetation, as well as the animal world, are associated with this colour.
Green indicates a positive, clean, protective power. In a way, it symbolises what humans believe in today, the placewhere the invisible, the magical, the religious manifest.
Westerners, lacking traditional spirituality, are deserting churches and turning to Nature as to a fragile God that mustbe protected from themselves. The notion of green living, of green energy, suggests exemplary behaviour that leavesno harmful trace on Earth and symbolises, in a way, a new form of sanctity.
Green is no longer just a color; it is the symbol of a struggle to defend the natural world and protect the heritage offuture generations. This is an extremely heavy burden on our contemporaries, that of turning back and saving theworld from an industrial system that has crushed our resources and without which we do not know how to live today.
We are overwhelmed by the very anxious feeling that we are responsible for a vertiginous fall that will leave uswithout water, without air, and without resources unless there is a sudden and immediate 180° turn. Breathless, wemove forward blindly, attempting seemingly in vain to save what we can and plug the leaks on a Titanic planet adrift.
The exhibition Vertige offers a parenthesis, a moment of symbiosis between Man and Nature, without guilt, withoutfatality... A world where the infinitely large, the sky, and the auroras borealis meet the microscopic organisms nestledin forest lichens. Vertige proposes a world where the human being is a bridge for the living and a sanctuary forNature.
Recreating a contemporary mythology, the exhibition aims to be an initiatory journey in an enchanted forest whereone can easily encounter will-o'-the-wisps, nymphs, and minotaurs. The stone guardians by Léo Nataf watch overthe balance of this micro-universe. Basile Boon's ceramics take us into an enchanted world where Cinderella'scarriage and the she-wolf of Remus and Romulus meet without anachronism. Andrew Erdos's glass lanterns guidethe visitor in an increasingly introspective immersive journey.
The encounter is meant to be spiritual, beginning literally and figuratively with Alice Grenier Nebout and hermythological frescoes, gradually becoming metaphysical and contemplative in the eyes of Marion Artense Gély,whose successive glazes create paintings that can layer up to 150 coats of paint and recall satellite images captureddeep in the galaxy.
Vertige is a baptism, a communion, akin to Jennifer Westjohn's photograph showing in a mirror the immersion of aman in green and luminous water. Vertige connects the immense to the minuscule, the positive to the negative, thepagan to the sacred, using humans as a hyphen between heaven and earth.
