Every dodo is not a tree

Jorge Pedro Nuñez

6 Feb — 30 Apr 2016

Jorge Pedro Nuñez presents a complete, efficient and streamlined installation, balanced, organized that neutralizes the industrial space of the art center. In other words, modernist. And it is indeed on western and south american functionalisms that Jorge Pedro Nuñez builds his profoundly referenced practice, with the humor and irreverence which characterize him.

In a strictly Latin American tradition, his approach embodies a certain syncretism or (let’s say) tropicalism. It works by mixing influences, colluting universes and aesthetics. It’s a play gathering materials and gleaned objects to create sculptures that should be read as poems manufactured in intransigence. Somewhere between the bourgeois salon and trading bank lobby, the installation creates an elegant and concrete universe, made of mounted metal leaves, geometric carpeting and constructivist sculptures from which emanates a strange magic. Even the title "Every dodo is not a tree" evokes, for sure a tree, but primarily a bird, emblematic victim of European imperialism, now become legendary.

Without defining Jorge Pedro Nunez as a militant artist - because that is not what the work stands for -, it is not wrong to see in his work a certain postcolonial critique. On the metal canvas are embedded small disks. While approaching , we realize that these are cans. Beyond the anecdote, those are seen here as the pure expression of a globalization responsible for the world's ills and especially the south. It is the same way, in the sculpture Clouzot Beckett (Picnic), 2015, a screen broadcasts a loop extracted from Clouzot’s Le Salaire de la Peur which described in 1953 the hellish conditions of oil extraction in... [lire plus]

Commissaire de l'exposition / Curator : Etienne Bernard