Être collectif — De la convivialité par nature, at Galerie Les filles du calvaire, brings together the work of artists from the young French scene, each coming from diverse backgrounds: Clément Davout, Damien Fragnon, Charlie Jouan, Jean-François Krebs, Naomi Maury and Felipe Vasquez, whose practices question the living.
Careful observation and a form of knowledge—both scientific and intuitive—of the living world compel us to profoundly reconsider the way we inhabit the world. The various life forms found in nature, through their singular behaviours, their discreet or burgeoning modes of existence, their subtle interactions, remind us that the boundaries we draw between things, between the human and the non-human, between inside and outside, are porous, even illusory. Everything is in everything. The interior is not separate from the exterior; it is its extension: “just as the cutaneous surface makes us participants in the universal balance, adapted to both the outside and the inside.”¹ To imagine ourselves outside this web of life, to detach or extract ourselves from it, is to deprive ourselves of the richness of our own being, of our capacity to be in the world, of a deep empathy toward all that lives.
The visitor is invited to enter a cavern where Naomi Maury’s fluorescent halos converse with Damien Fragnon’s rocky ceramics. Upstairs, we are immersed in new forms: from Charlie Jouan’s worlds to Clément Davout’s nocturnal paintings, from Jean-François Krebs’s blown-glass sculptures to Felipe Vasquez’s living installation, which calls us back to the wild.
The exhibition thus proposes to open a space of dialogue between natural elements and our sensitive bodies, through artistic practices that summon the senses. It is a matter of entering another way of perceiving, moving, relating. Occupying space differently—whether in discretion or brilliance—absorbing, allowing oneself to be permeated, putting oneself in the place of another. Experiencing directly, bodily, an expanded world in which every thing, visible or invisible, partakes in the same breath.
¹ Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants, 2016.