Je suis très emballé.e 14.05-15.06.2024

From the firm ground or from the invisible, everything is emergence.

Autumn is not a summer transformed. (1)

There are winter walks that warm your heart and revive, at the bend in a grove or an alley, the sweet memory of summer light, a distractor of flesh, leaves and rocks.

The ‘Je suis très emballé.e’ exhibition is just this kind of walk. Here, Eros, Appolon, Juno, Celadon and Astrea, Amours and Faunes, Allegories and Giants are draped in the eye of artists Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout. These marble and granite decorations, which in fine weather exalt the space of the gardens, now don their tunic of modesty.

When evening came

I rested in the monotonous grass,

And I got a taste

To this interminable desire,

Winged cry of trouble

That light retains when it dies. (2)

Behind these protective fabrics that conceal virtuoso forms, on these pedestals like stages, several affairs are being played out. Is time suspended? Are the bodies made of stone and flesh alive under these capes?  

In this new setting, orchestrated by the artists, mineral, plant and human life merge. They interweave and recreate scenes, poems, tributes and legends.

Two ghosts! That's when I dream in the shadows,

They come to hear and speak to me.

A doubtful day shows me and hides their number.

Through the boughs and the dark foliage (3)

The photographs in the exhibition have been conceived around the principle of ‘wrapping’. Some of the images are the result of direct interventions by the artists in the space - like a deliberate tribute to the work of Christo and Jeanne Claude - while others are the result of their wandering. Taken together, they act like a sentence telling the story of a dormant world in the exhibition space. 

A very personal cosmos suddenly takes shape before our very eyes - the two artists have in fact entitled this photographic series Cosmogony - with images of details, performances, landscapes and memories, all nourished by the same mystery, all made up of the same chimeras. 

In this way, the artists play with fades, backgrounds, shadows and draperies, sculpted in turn by the wind or the hand of the duo. Combining the tricks of theatre and stagecraft, the series is a photographic poem. Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout tell us about a winter in an imaginary garden. A winter in which, for statues, bodies and fantasies, withdrawal is sometimes tantamount to survival. 

Three noises and a brigadier

The song of day announces itself

Blossoming, playing and greening

Whether the word or the bramble hangs in the air

Drum beating to the rhythm of my fear

Salvation, opprobrium or roture

Rameau pushing Racine into his heart

I willingly bend to revoyure

[1] Etel Adnan, « Saisons », 2008

[1] Giuseppe Ungaretti, "La vie d'un homme" (Vita di un uomo), « Cri », 1928

[1] Victor Hugo, « Les Orientales », « Fantomes », 1829

Download the press release: here

Artists’s website : taufenbachpourtout.com/