Caught in a gangue of clay, everyday objects lie in a room open to the eye like a theater stage itself entirely covered in clay: a moped, a helmet and an old computer, a cart, dishes, furniture, a sofa, a washing machine, a battered suitcase, piles of cables and shoes, dead bottles and hanging clothes...
creation in 2000, including at the Cent Quatre in Paris in 2014 and at Milan's Pirelli HangarBicocca in 2020.
Petrified, this condensation of our materialistic lives inevitably evokes Pompeii, buried under the lava of Mount Vesuvius, but also, as the installation's title suggests, a rite of purification through the earth stemming from Chinese tradition. A fantastic memento mori, this fascinating work was created from found objects and clay by Franco-Chinese conceptual artist Chen Zhen shortly before his death in 2000. A premonitory tomb of our consumer society asphyxiated by its own excesses, of our world mired in pollution, "hastening [...] its self-destruction" and heading towards its "irreversible destiny 1 ", this "serious monochrome", in the artist's own words, invites us to meditate on our condition. Participating in an "archaeology of the future" ("showing people today's objects as they will be discovered in the future"), it proceeds above all from a desire for the transformation and sublimation of used objects called to a new life (by returning to the earth), called to be purified to "provoke a new destiny"...
1 Quotes from Entretiens de Chen Zhen avec Jérôme Sans, conducted in 1992 and published in 2003 by Presses du réel / Palais de Tokyo
"CHEN ZHEN - DOUBLE EXIL"
GALLERIA CONTINUA
87, RUE DU TEMPLE, PARIS 3E
JUSQUER TO JANUARY 6, 2024
