The
beauties of ‘Mycelium – Génie savant, génie brut’
This
exhibition, in an old abbey on the route of Saint Jacques de Compostelle,
“L’abbaye d’Aberive” is showing 25 artists. Within monastic meditation rooms, the artworks glow in the
space and light that they have been given to shine in.
In
one room, the artist Pesset, who carves insightful sayings and adages into
wood, and decorates the work elaborately carved hazel bush and ivy branches.
‘Wealth
comes from the mind and not the mind comes from wealth’
It is clear that the motivation
of the works are not financial.
There is a feeling that the genuine creativity is born of something deeper. Quite
often in art history, the artists must use fine, expensive materials, are
commissioned, produce their work which can be bought, sold, used to express an
idea or principal. We see this at
the Louvre, Versaille, Contemporary Art Markets.
But what is striking
about this exhibition is a use of non-expensive materials. This exhibition uses the very basic,
often natural materials to make art: shells, sticks, disused cardboard, papier
maché, junk. The artists make the
work without patrons, commissioners or galleries, the work is not made to adorn
churches or be symbols of power.
The art works have been
quietly made without fanfare, as if from a deeper necessity. Weaving as unquestioningly as a bee might
a hive, or a bird might a nest, the artists work with the same slow, painstaking
care, combining the urgency to complete the work. Another of the artists,
Durand uses the natural colour of sea shells to create reliefs made entirely
from shells. These very precise
and sensitive
images are of deer, crocodiles, polar bears, falcons, couples, fountains, each
constructed with exquisite care and love.
Jeanne Giraud creates intricate illustrations made out of embroidery and
Vrankic, just with fine lead pencil, creates three metre high images of people
from original perspectives.
 |
| Davor Vrankic |
He
says:
“When I start to draw there is an idea
at the beginning but I never try to explain it. It is rather like a need or urgency. I feel something and I want to make
it. It’s a paradox because my
drawings are very slow and laborious, but at the same time there is always a feeling of urgency to get it
finished. It is this contradiction
between the slowness and the force of this real urgency, I think, that produces
my work”
Each artists has a unique
‘voice’, an individual way of expression using their images, manner of
creating. John
Ruskin described this as something within us:
“I don’t think myself a great genius,
but I believe I have genius, something different from mere cleverness, for I am
not clever in the sense that millions of people are – lawyers, physicians, but
there is a strong instinct in me, which I cannot analyse, to draw and describe
the things I love – not for reputation nor for the good of others, nor for my
own advantage but a sort of instinct like that for eating or drinking”
Almost
an obsession, the art works each have a ‘birthing’ with a unique method. There are the sculptures of Ghyslaine
and Sylvain Staëlens, potent and striking figures formed from sticks, wool,
stone, wire, mud, chains, string, paint and nails, the almost alive portraits
of Jean-Luc Giraud which eerily move and transform, with use of computer animation,
to the wooden panels of Reynaud, who paints almost ritualistic patterns, almost
Buddhist mandala-like, with a sense of numerology and the sacredness of number.
We
see artists explore and follow their obsessions. Vidal, for instance, has a
fascination with twins. His
photography shows people in double. And Chesné has a fascination with the
microscosmic or interior of a continual doodle of pattern, which he calls
a“perpetual zooming inward”
In a
spiritual sense, the work represents the accomplishment of individual
expression. In India, this expression of ones purpose, an expression of one’s
deep life calling is called the ‘Dharma’
This expression of the self-purpose in life comes from deep within. It
is the nurturing of the god or
goddess that lies in embryo form, deep within the soul where the talents unique
to every individual lie. Other spiritual guides, such as Jesus, might be
refering to Dharma when he said:
“Lay up for yourselves
treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where
thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will
your heart be also”
Laurent
Danchin, curator of the exhibition, celebrates the eclectism of this birthing
of talent and creativity, paying homage “not to art but to the endless
diversity of the creative impulse, which seems to be the only power capable of
putting a stop to the forces of destruction that run abundantly in our world
today”
Some
of the artists refer to the healing power of their creativity. After working in a palliative
care unit, Ghislaine worked on her complex skeleton people drawings and Lorande
describes the process of his creating his meticulous coloured pencil crayon
drawings on card in saying:
“Real
life is a lot more chaotic and a lot more explosive than my world, which is
very constructed”
 |
| Ghislaine |
Joel Lorand
Coutant
started his patterned abstracts after a bout of tubercolosis and Vollin dealt
with the grief of his lost family in Algeria by painting his childhood
memories. He says:
“I can’t paint things realistically and
I prefer the vision of the reality”
The
artists experience their instinct and genius and feel great pleasure in the act
of creation. However, Paul Amar,
finds this genius comes to him so easily he doesn’t even see himself as ‘an
artist’ He says
“I
am not an artist”
and
yet his amazing glitter-covered shells form into incredible shrine-like
monuments.
 |
| Paul Amar |
Other
artists simply stop listening to their ego or doubts or thinking. Joaquim Baptista Antunes said:
“Following
my unconscious drive, I’ve taught myself.
It was my way of breathing.
An enormous pleasure”
Franck Lundangi says:
“Drawing,
I do it naturally, just like I breath.
So I haven’t needed to be taught.
For me it is natural.
Everything I do, it is first and foremost a pleasure. I do it without any confinements. I do what I do and that’s all. The colours also come naturally. When I work, everything is instinct.”
Ghislaine
says:
“I
no longer wait for exhibitions. I
work when I can and no longer force myself to produce. If you’ve got something to say it will
come out whether you try or not.
If you think too much about it, it will spoil it. It will become false”
This
capacity the artists show for raw, expressive creativity, Danchin suggests, has
been somehow demeaned over the last few centuries.
“The
twentieth century has been a century of deconstruction, of decomposition, of
return to the elementary principles.
With its strange hybridizations and its rediscovery of complexity and
skills, the twenty first century will see the emergence of new synthesis and
new foundations which will boldy dip their roots into the compost of the most
ancient cultures, hoping to bridge the gap between the old and the new civilization,
a task of vital importance today”
 |
| Joaquim Baptista Antunes |
The
works have very raw power, such as Antune’s giant monsters and explore the
complexities of human feeling in Sander’s hanging totem like drape of human
figures.
|
| Jim Sanders |
The fresh colours and joyful expressions
of Abello Vive’s paintings on card, or Boudeau’s naïve expressions Mont St Michael
and Germain Tessier images on discarded cardboard using ripolin enamel and
Maité’s enchanting studies of still-life, delighting in the physicality of
colour, form and light.
 |
| Maïté D |
Danchin
goes onto suggest that we have neglected within us something very deep and
vital to our preservation on our earth.
Catherine
Ursin gives life to witch life, painting large powerful images of witches on
paper with gouache and Kurhajec’s fetish sculptures give space for this
vitality. He says:
“My
work, like African festish, comes to life here and now, in a paradoxical way
inexplainable, as if a part primitive of mind had conserved an ancestral memory
able to combat our complaisancy and weaknesses”
Using
antelope horns, rocks, feathers, hair, wood shells his figures show the
expressions of some raw, wild interior being and Patoux is in pursuit of this
raw power, obsessively photographing the last fetish makers in West Africa.
This
deep vital life-force within us is expressed by Reynaud.
“When
you touch the depths of water, or the spirituality of the sky, that is
religion. It is a force which lets
you go, the same you have to get to work in the morning. It’s not really a mental force, because
the subject doesn’t dominate. It’s
a force that is in the plexus that dominates, a little like pregnant woman when
she’s giving birth”
and
and we can see this in Lundangi’s paintings of umbilical cords, seeds, birth
and animals.
This
giving birth to new ideas and vision, quite outside the trends and ideologies
of the current society, is what is remarkable of this exhibition. Danchin says
“The
twenty first century will see the emergence of new synthesis and new
foundations which will boldy dip their roots in the compost of the most ancient
cultures, hoping to bridge the gap between the old and the new civilization, as
task of vital importance today”
It
runs until 28th September 2014.
Information
at www.abbaye-auberive.com
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