Jean-Pascal Flavien
2006, Brussels
IT IS A WORLD WITHOUT US, A WORLD THAT WE DO NOT SEE.
I work with dinosaurs in an intuitive and obsessive way. What most interests me about them is the fact that they allow me to think and to create, and this is what I hope to bring to my work. They arrive in my mind because they come from another world, one which is totally foreign, totally outside the rest of my work, and my life. In fact they continue to represent a world that is always far removed, or rather, it is a foreign world, which is permanently re-enacted.
Their nature of being their own fully-fledged world, gives me the chance to revisit all my working methods and, as well as to re-envisage an architecture particular to their nature that the modes of exhibition is inspired by a temporal structure specific to their appearance. In this, each intervention, drawing, or sculpture, is an attempt to make a stranger out of oneself to the point of our own exclusion. This is a world without us.
Their invisible nature, or rather the fact that nobody has seen them and only fragments or vestiges of them still remain, allows me to realise spaces where nature of visibility itself is a mix, and to take into account the non-visible volume as much as that which very visibly floats on the surface. Whilst admitting at one time the very living side of what we cannot see, of this world which becomes for oneself. Drawings become the tools through which one sees and creates the interior of one’s space, in order to deepen it. Nature gets thicker, deeper and becomes detached from the finite world, by constituting a large mass similar to the unconscious mind. This mass is complex, stratified, shifting, blind, actively on the move. Within this mass, it is possible to make cuts and also to create surfaces or maps, either temporal or spatial. It is the colour red, which appears, and, as it is applied through a filter of our own world, it makes us into the stranger. The orange is a red.
The installation at the Gallery Ghislaine Hussenot: The first part, which is a physical experience, is made of one volume on another volume (the mezzanine). Together this comprises a pyramid. These are the ‘blind volumes’. Then, there is a camera which filters everything one sees in red. And there is this image, independent of its source, an image of a cut, of cells in which modulated depth decreases to the point of disappearance. In these cells, drawings exist for themselves.
Jean-Pascal Flavien
