Without a doubt the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias could recognize herself, if not already so, in these verses by Baudelaire: “Nature is a temple where living pillars / Sometimes they utter confused words / Man crosses forests of symbols / Who observe him with familiar gazes. “ In any case, the sensation aroused in the Museum of Fine Arts of Grenoble, in the context of the exhibition “De la nature”, his installation, at least inside, is good. The outside looks like a large concrete vault or so. The interior features a set of columns, sculpted with a thousand vegetable and organic forms, oozing with water and reminiscent of the Rococo caves or more exactly the rockery of the 18th century. One moves as in a living, murmuring body. Baudelaire, but also Dante. Exhibited in Grenoble in 2016, representing Spain at the 42nd and 45th Venice Biennale, Cristina Iglesias was invited together with Philippe Cognée, Wolfgang Laib and Giuseppe Penone.
Four artists, already awarded in Grenoble with monographs, with very different works, for the same theme. Guy Tosatto, director of the museum, assumes it and even claims it. It is, he says, “making perceptible the diversity of approaches, experiences and visions, which constitutes, although man is increasingly an urban animal, our original environment”. And this, of course, at a time when our relationship with the environment is as acute as ever. Co-curator of the exhibition, Sophie Bernard quotes the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was said “Made of the same flesh as the world”. We cannot forget it, for our own survival.
a vegetable world, more felt than seen
Philippe Cognee is a painter. Known for his “blurring” process of his large paintings of buildings, slaughterhouses, he also turned to landscapes, rendering them powerfully. More recently he has devoted himself to flowers, on large canvases. It is not so much the beauty that comes out, but the strangeness of the living with perhaps the same anguish as the character of Sartre, in nausea, in front of the root of a tree. His other paintings, poplars, blocks of sand, arouse a feeling of déjà vu, but like a dream dream.
Wolfgang Laib made pollen the material of his works and their collection into a discipline of patience and asceticism, very similar to a form of meditation. This gives here, in a single room, like a yellow carpet with blurred edges, which gives off a feeling of lightness and fleetingness, of risk at the slightest breath of dispersion. In a room opposite, a long panel looks like a very light gray monochromatic. He actually saw fragile white inscriptions, like a whisper there too. This is contrasted with, or corresponds to, a large ovoid block of black granite on the ground.
Giuseppe Penone comes from the Italian movement of poor art. Here we discover half-vegetable and half-human figures that appear in a grassy and wooded space, but also very large drawings of trunks and branches, made with rubbing of leaves and bark, in an almost monochrome that seems to really lead us into a vegetable world, more felt that seen. “Scents, colors and sounds respond to each other. “ Baudelaire’s poetry Correspondences, in evil flowers.
