Multimillennials
Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin
“Multimillennials” exhibition presents the latest paintings and drawings created by Blaise Schwartz. His works offer a spatial and temporal interruption, where the figure of man disappears. His work favors animals, plants and minerals, arranged in compositions with multiple narratives.
Among these are monkeys, bats, dinosaurs, dogs or snails, which occupy the space of the canvas and sometimes meet there. The monkey’s hand interacts with the snail, whose horns – in other paintings – resonate with a bat wing or a human finger. This fragmentation of bodies functions in the manner of a visual logograph, an enigma to be solved, one of the possible answers to which could be found in archaism, hybridity and slowness. The snail is a symptomatic illustration of this. An animal that appeared several hundred million years ago, known for its slowness and hermaphrodite, it moves between the inside and the outside, equipped with its spiral shell.
The spherical dimension of this form, embracing the idea of totality, is reminiscent of several paintings by Blaise Schwartz where the earth appears, sometimes in its geographical form, almost satellite, sometimes like a globe. He thus creates distortions of scale, between microcosm and macrocosm, but also shifts in meaning. The earth then becomes an object, enclosed in a brick cage and placed in a window, or materializes in the form of a ball or a simple pebble. There we witness a sort of mise en abyme, the earth – as an object – resting on the earth – the ground –, alongside the vegetation.
This alternation between the microscopic and the macroscopic contributes to blurring our temporal and geographical framework; no doubt an evocation of this time when the artist traveled across Asia by bicycle, leading him to experience long distances while observing the land, the roads, the vegetation. Already in 2019, the artist recovered a tiled world map from the abandoned school in the village of Liuyin in China, which he moved to a transit area, at the crossroads of a path and a river. Arranging this map in the form of elementary architecture, the aim was to create a dialogue between this cartography centered on Asia and the Pacific, and the houses and tombs in the surrounding area.
This physical materialization of the world, this movement as much mental as physical, echoes the paintings presented here, in which an element – living or not – regularly disrupts the space without ever fully integrating into it. Where there is an abundance of vegetation, a computer screen, for example, disrupts our visual perception and creates a loss of bearings.
Elsewhere, the satellite vision of the earth is destabilized by the incursion of a yellow parallelepiped, in which a snail slowly curls up. Two spatialities confront each other, like this painting where monkey and bat dominate the low-angle framing. The massive animal is supported by a completely artificial architecture.
The work of Blaise Schwartz presented within “Multimillennials” thus offers multiple telluric visions, bringing together time and space, alternating between the natural and the artificial, to the point of giving his works an enigmatic dimension that gives us inevitably puts one at a distance. His paintings and drawings are part of a process of resurgence, that of animals, human fragments and geographies that we find in several works, and more generally that of a reflection around living things and their evolution.
2023