Vista follies

2013

Dried clay, photograph, video, acrylic paint

Exhibition held at Art Lacuna Gallery, London

Re-creations which use parts of a frozen past provoke an experience outside of any linear chronology or succession. Not really in the past and not really in the present, they are often linked to a fictional time which never really existed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a fondness for a fetishized view of nature, for a representation of the landscape as an object of worship through herbariums, aquariums or greenhouse started to become very popular in Europa. It consists in a recreation of entire small worlds, cut away from the present time, a transplanted and artificial nature, framed and domesticated. Those microcosms are often embellished with small sculptures and architectures from diverse and blurred historical periods and culture.

This project explores notions central to the construction of reality where the folly becomes a symbolic structure capable of manipulating an artificial paradise in which the viewer becomes lodged in multiple contexts simultaneously.

I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous you, and solitude you.

Keats’s preface to Ann Radcliffe’s
The mystery of Udolpho, 1794