With a selection of artworks by:
ALIGHIERO e BOETTI / CESAR / Antoni CLAVE / Francesco CLEMENTE / CORNEILLE / ERRO / Keith HARING / Yayoi KUSAMA / André MASSON / François MORELLET / Yoshitomo NARA / Edouard ODIER / Erwin OLAF / Mimmo ROTELLA / Julian SCHNABEL / Hiroshi SUGIMOTO / Gérard TRAQUANDI
Wretched is he who sets his trust upon
The world!—how truly speaks philosophy,
Saying that each thing in the end must die,
Must change its form and take another on.
Fair Tempé's vale shall be in hills uptossed,
And Athos' peak become a level plain;
Old Neptune's fields shall some day wave with grain.
Matter abides forever, form is lost.
Pierre de Ronsard, Contre les bûcherons de la forêt de Gastine
Ronsard’s elegy ends with this philosophical sentence from the poet, obsessed by the passage of time, “Matter abides forever, form is lost”. The exhibition deals with relations between matter and form.
The most eloquent illustration could be the Compression (1969) by César in which the original form of the material – the tube – is lost but in which the material – the aluminium of the tubes – remains unchanged. Also to what extent can we dissociate matter from form, in other words, substance from feeling? Must we distinguish, as Descartes does, the extended substance (texture, water, land, nature, molecule) from the thinking substance? Finally, does matter find itself altered by the act of creating? Artists have in turn explored the varied forms that the same matter takes on to the detriment of its original form.
The transformation of matter operates an abstract rebirth in the work by Sugimoto, Mirtouan Sea, Sounion II. Morellet, in Trois trames de tirets minces (1973), starts from a geometricization of space to transform our retinian space into a myriad of points that can no longer distinguish the drawn figures. Rotella(Sans titre, 1963) lacerates the matter and allows the thinking substance to be revealed; Haring uses one of his most iconic symbols which is the atom in Barking dog (1983), to criticize the media’s influence over a passive society. Traquandi and Masson lacerates the material so as to feel only the sensations of the substance that nature can produce in its virgin state. It is the same relationship with nature as that treated by Odier in Crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews (1834): the thinking desire and power distort the matter until the water is made to obey the order of the opened arms. Schnabel (Untitled, 2008) starts from the photograph of a religious topos, Shiva to submit the precision of its original contours to the lineaments of a liquid paint that projects the balanced paradigm into a moving reality.
The essence of the matter remains, but the form by evolution is lost.
