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Walking Through...

Collection presentation

Looking at the landscape, the attentive walker jots things down in his notebook, outlines the first features of a composition, sketches this oddity and that, in some way taking the physical and metaphorical measure of the expanse that spreads out before his eyes; his memory is formed in that split second. The exhibition Walking through… happens to conjure up this relation to space, as well as to time.

“Savage, storm-tossed regions alternated with the charming and gentle, and poor, squalid, desolate, neglected homes with respectable, proper, prosperous ones, and constantly this wayfarer and jolly, high-spirited vagabond of sorts, feeling utterly carefree as he went marching along, amused himself splendidly by attentively observing all the various sights spread out before his eyes.” Robert Walser, A Poet's Life

Looking at the landscape, the attentive walker jots things down in his notebook, outlines the first features of a composition, sketches this oddity and that, in some way taking the physical and metaphorical measure of the expanse that spreads out before his eyes; his memory is formed in that split second. The exhibition Walking through… happens to conjure up this relation to space, as well as to time. In this spirit, Kuitca’s series of 19 tondi, a veritable “diary” kept almost daily, spans the period from 1994 to 2000, during which the artist painted, wrote, drew and scribbled on a re-used canvas which he spread on his garden table. During his activities, colours and motifs were overlaid on each other like a palimpsest where none of the layers completely disappeared. Then, when the time was right and the picture finished, the painter embarked on the next one. The split second thoughts, fleeting moods, and fragmented time were in this way incorporated in each of those tondi.

Geert Goiris Melting Snow, 2005
© Photo : Courtesy art: concept, Paris

Nature is an object of observation and an area of experimentation at one and the same time. Some artists walk through it physically, like Richard Long, who, during lengthy and sometimes arduous walks, crisscrossed a defined territory, the traces of which are conserved in his works. Other artists shift nature’s outlines, or else reinvent nature mentally in the manner of David Zink Yi, for whom the human body becomes a surface to move over, and whose video echoes the poetic graphic variations of Cy Twombly and Janaina Tschäpe.

Didier Marcel, for his part, literally borrows from the landscape, and in so doing he samples and reveals the qualities of something banal that has never been talked about. Xavier Veilhan’s figures, which are stranger and involved in uncertain activities, wearing morning coats and holding opera hats, and sometimes bedecked in feathers, with a beached shark at their feet, pose on a beach, with the sea as backdrop. This sweeping pixellized landscape remains enigmatic and calls to mind the illusionism of the photographic sets of an outmoded modernity.

The artists brought together here all show a particular and never ordinary way of looking at things, as is underscored by the photographs of Geert Goiris, which, to borrow his own words, represent “a furtive and fleeting glance at another reality”. His images have a strange and alien relationship to places and objects. They reify the former, while they turn the latter into landscapes. Time seems to be at a standstill. All these examples of desolate nature seem to conjure up the traces of a past human presence, which is now incongruous.

Through the works of more than some 20 artists, all with different activities, the plurality and wealth of the relationship between artists and landscape are outlined.