GALLERY OPENING Wednesday 15 January 2020 at 18h30
And they had a lot of curly-snails…
Emma Picard defines her work as collaborative sculpture along the lines of Fluxus. In 2018, the artist begins work with 3 hives and 50,000 “assistant bees”. She produces astonishing works using the technique of washing with lemon juice in which the bees sculpt the abstraction of their geometric alveoli. Her figurative drawings, naturally “beexelized”, lift a veil on the absurdity of the world: Adam and Eve, chased out of Paradise pollinating by hand – like Chinese from Sichuan – meet a couple straight out of the famous poem by the Count of Lautréamont. “Beautiful as the fortuitous meeting on a carpet of bees of an eyelash curler and a snail claw”, so many possible images of our survival in a “Poetic Republic”.
www.botoxs.fr/evenement/emma-picard-deborah-forever-chap-2
LUZ PLEGADA / LES MILLE NUITS et UNE NUIT
The exhibition presents the first 3 plates of the series Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit (1996), as well as 10 of the 14 plates of the suite Luz plegada created by the Spanish artist José María Sicilia(1955) between 1992 and 1993 in the Parisian studio of the publisher Michael Woolworth.
“In the LUZ PLEGADA cycle, the use of diaphanous Japanese papers, the folding and double printing on the front and back of the sheets promote a fertile confusion between surface and depth. In the folded light of the pages, a curious and seductive hide-and-seek game unfolds. Delicate butterflies and industrious bees, precarious insects, sometimes hidden, sometimes illuminated by a drop of golden honey, weave their way through the blond spots and purplish shadows. Similar to the unconscious activity that reigns within the hive, Sicilia’s work somehow claims the right to operate within itself, (…) out of sight. »
Caroline Joubert / www.centredelagravure.be/en/artists/758-sicilia-jose-maria
“Since 1986, I have collaborated with him the most: together we have produced more than 300 works. His high standards and audacity make me constantly push the limits of my practice: Dip a book in a bath of beeswax, make a lizard run on a lithographic stone to capture the imprint of its paws, replicate in litho on plaster a Persian carpet, unplug an old book to cover its pages with contemporary prints… for him, I even put freshly cut flowers on press, leaving only vivid traces of colour on the sheet, as a metaphor for consummate beauty”.