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Paris (AFP)
Its cherry blossoms are everywhere, lighting up the walls of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with an ephemeral spring: for his first major exhibition in Paris, the British artist Damien Hirst seems to have left deadly provocation for a luminous universe and brittle.
The winner of the Turner Prize 1995, from Bristol, with British humor tinged with irony and phlegm, welcomes the press dressed in a pink suit and a white shirt, like the flowers of his paintings. And her hair dyed blue like the color of her skies.
Worried about possible contagion by the Covid, he asked that the journalists who came to interview him undergo a test an hour before.
Damien Hirst, 56, is ranked fourth most highly rated contemporary art artist (according to the Artprice 2020 report), after Americans Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool. He had exhibited at the Perrotin gallery in 1991 but never in a Parisian museum institution.
Forgotten this time the dark themes of his installations and sculptures, often provocative and icy: sharks or the cow in a formalin vat, black flies, skulls set with diamonds, which made the fame of this leader of ” Young British Artists “. In the canvases of “Cherry Blossoms”, only tens of thousands of bright and joyful touches.
“I want my visitors to forget everything and fall for my paintings. I want to make you feel that no matter what is going on in the world, you can find yourself facing pleasant things,” he told AFP.
And, at the same time, the flowering of the cherry trees is brief and also expresses “fragility, life and death”, explains the artist.
– “Like a lobster” –
For this vast project completed in 2020, 107 monumental paintings. Thirty are exhibited at the Fondation Cartier.
They combine thick touches and projections of paint: a mixture of pointillism and Action painting (gestural painting, often by projection) typical of Hirst, whose references are as well Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as Georges Seurat or Pierre Bonnard.
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Recognizing having shunned painting because it had gone out of fashion in the 80s and 90s, he explains that he recently returned to the spontaneity of the pictorial gesture by moving away from minimalism.
In his London studio, he worked for three years with “fatigue” and “delight”. “You had to climb and descend a ladder all day and spray paint everywhere. I felt like a lobster sometimes, with my arm all twitched,” he says.
Why the cherry trees? “In my garden, I have a flowering cherry tree. I use it as a clock and every year I say to myself + one more year +”.
Faced with this abundant orchard which communicates with the sky through the bays of Jean Nouvel’s building, Isabelle Gaudefroy, director of programming of the Foundation, evokes “a real dazzling”: “the impression of plunging into the jubilation of painting” .
About the controversies around the high cost of his works, of an art elite who think only of money and of which he is part, Damien Hirst replies that “it is very difficult to make money. art without money, especially when it comes to works of this size “.
“People criticize me by saying that I think about money rather than art. But I always focus on art, not money! Money is just the key, it’s like language, it opens up worlds, ”he pleads.
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Highly sought after, the artist knows how to stage himself, from Paris to Rome, and he tastes provocation. This summer, at the Galerie Borghese in the Italian capital, he is exhibiting sculptures, including a man and a woman chained together, alongside very classic works by Bernin.
– Cherry blossoms, from July 6 to January 2, 2022.
© 2021 AFP
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