Lucas Arruda
Baya
Hicham Berrada
Marie Bovo
Eugène Carrière
Gustave Courbet
Eugène Delacroix
Marc Desgrandchamps
Latifa Echakhch
Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano
Victor Hugo
Tadashi Kawamata
Per Kirkeby
Alicja Kwade
Félix Labisse
Gustave Le Gray
Eugène Leroy
Robert Longo
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Joan Mitchell
Gustave Moreau
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Gina Pane
Giuseppe Penone
Francis Picabia
Paul Rebeyrolle
Odilon Redon
Gerhard Richter
Léon Louis Riesener
Ugo Rondinone
Nicolas de Staël
Zao Wou-Ki
Trees and forests appear as a source of inspiration, addressed through
various mediums and prisms both as a natural subject and a cultural
object. According to the artists' gaze, the forest is in turn an inspiring
refuge of romantic solitary reveries, a receptacle of ancestral myths,
the nostalgic symbol of an idealized past, a subject of pictorial
experimentation or a reflection of our relationship to our natural
environment. As Gerhard Richter observed “the forest in general has
special significance. You can lose your way in forests, feel deserted, but
also secure, held fast in the bosom of the undergrowth.” 1 In this exhibition, the sun appears between the branches of the tallest
trees (Latifa Echakhch), or disappears in Obscure Gardens (Marc
Desgrandchamps). We dive into the wood (Giuseppe Penone), we
offer ourselves to the metamorphosis of the living (Alicja Kwade), to
the memory that it imprints in us (Gina Pane). It is the specificities of
the places, or the universality of the emotions which they convene that
the artists retain: a field close to a wood (Francis Picabia), the Pastret
garden (Gustave Le Gray), valleys of the Loue or a brook in a clearing
(Gustave Courbet). So many places carrying an intrinsic poetry which
artists have made their subject. As the poets of which Gaston Bachelard spoke, the painter who “lives the forest” is also in front of “a fix immensity” that they feel and capture 2 . A temporal and emotional immensity gathered in one place.
Some works materialize a poetic sensation. Ugo Rondinone's Italian
dancing olive trees branches and Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano's palm
tree seeds give shape to a memory, embodying cherished people and
places. The twigs of Robert Longo's Study of Brain Tree extend like
our neural network collecting memories. For Victor Hugo, the forest
is a mystery whose contemplation “fills the heart with love 3 ”. In the
mythopoetic universe of Félix Labisse, the forest becomes a surrealist
sensual Amazone, a hybrid form between plant and human. Odilon
Redon renders it in a dreamlike female allegory. In the work of Eugène
Leroy, the paint matter itself becomes a landscape, in that of Nicolas
de Staël, as well as that of Per Kirkeby, Simon Hantaï, Judit Reigl, Zao
Wou-Ki, Joan Mitchell and Paul Rebeyrolle; nature becomes the subject
of visual experiments in a dynamic tension between figuration and
abstraction.
- Gerhard Richter, Exhibition catalog, Basel, Fondation Beyeler, 2014.
- Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace, Paris, PUF, 1957.
- Victor Hugo, « Aux arbres », Les Contemplations, 1843.
