Nature_Culture > Project Nature/.../Natures
[Project Nature_Natures]
Based around the conventional dichotomy Nature/culture,
the project as a whole questions man relationship to Nature simultaneously
referred as concept, space and representation.
Beyond the definition given by dictionaries, « Nature
» is a conceptual territory which exceeds, transcends its own physicality
and which is given to all possibles, credibles, probabilities and art fictions
It is not only called upon for environmental reasons. It is in turn material,
representation interrogating the nature of man, the nature of nature, their
conditions and the societal problems span which impose their mutual interactions.
Although the questioning of nature’s idea holds,
by no means, any originality, there is no choice but to accept the rise
of environmental problems, massive industrialization and emergence of new
sciences, it actualises itself and assumes various shapes.
Either faith in science or supporters of negative growth,
the belief loses its way in paradoxes and finds no acceptable answer, the
aporia emerges.
[Cabinet of Curiosities]
At first glance, when confronted to Lionel Loetscher productions
as a whole, a feeling of bri-à-brac outlines. Nature becomes a motif:
protestation motif for some, embellishment one for others. An esthetical
impulse attracts us in the esotericism of peculiar shapes: tree in a glass,
landscape grown in a bathtub, a sink, on a table, noodles packaged in a
zip bag, in a flask, in a packet, samples of old wallpapers with various
floral motifs containing digital drawings, researches and myrmecological
studies.
The results of those disparate approaches, make us think
of the 16th and 17th century curiosities cabinet, where in one space (the
portfolio, the workshop, the show room) is assembled, gathered, listed,
a multitude of rare or strange objects representing the three contemporary
realms: the animal and vegetal kingdom (naturalia), mankind with its realizations
(artificiala), and the world of information technology through its representation
(virtualia).
This contemporary cabinet is being enriched with the explorations
and experimentations development of the artist and the discovery of new
magmatic grounds in continuous mutation (sciences, technologies, virtual
spaces). At times romantic creator, at times white collar scientist, at
times sociologist, anthropologist invested in the social surrounding, Lionel
Loetscher gives evidence of a tremendous freedom from which emerges shapes,
a microcosm or a summary of the world.
His quest for the idea of « Nature », brings
him, eventually, to use science and technology, great tales, a fiction with
ants like heroes, created landscapes, symbolic diversions where noodles
become a stem cell of new terrorism..
The natural history in the Nature/Natures project contains
his bag of wonders within which is outlined, projected mythology, fascination,
contemplation, man’s fears facing the enigma of nature and life.
Nature sways in this cabinet‘s sky within the uncertainty
of its own condition.
We are not far from the Renaissance. The wonders making
up the curiosity cabinets had their shares of witticisms and impostures
vis-à-vis the unexplained, the indescribable.
Unicorn horn, paradise bird, etc, cram the selves side
by side with odd and strange natural fossils, sea shells, urchins and others…
This eminently contemporary period of time on more than one point, was haunted,
tormented by the idea of passage, transmutation. The alchemy was going strong
at the time.
Nature is ordered, scheduled, indexed, listed, falsified,
crossed, diverted, and explained by science and man’s imagination.
Lionel Loetscher universe shows us the inner vacuity by placing us in an
off centered world, linked to some impenetrable rhizomes of networked meshed
referents, giving an open structure to the numerous readings and to the
narration proliferation.
Close to surrealism, the artist exudes some poetic substance
of a reality crossed to an imaginary, a fiction in which tales, sciences,
arts blend. The marvelous is questioned by rationality as the seductive
pageantry, the beautifulness of his productions hides deeply the anxieties
of a society. It concerns our own existence as a fiction and the pretence
becomes the bastion of the critical system within which man reiterates the
sophist irony: summoning the mockery in order to question the authentic.
The “False-genuine” contributes to the construct “Genuine-false”.
The false is reinstated by dignity as it brings out a reality now opaque.
[Sort of space]
When considering Lionel Loetscher work, we are stricken
by an “Alice in wonderland” syndrome. Indeed, the world set
forth for us by the artist, is nourished with ornaments (wallpaper, plate,
flowery chandelier) for visual delight. This world of seductive superfluity
forces us in a contemplative posture. This wonderland, a platitude marked
by euphemisms, hyperboles, litotes, metaphors in which we go through, gives
accurate information on our universe wove with appealing “disturbing
intimacies”. In this imaginary world, objects we cohabit with, in
the real world, take on a whole new symbology. The domestic artefacts (forks,
razors, clothes’ pins, dishes) usually inoffensive are self dramatizing,
demonizing, oversizing. Alphabetic noodles, of which the child’s play
consists in putting together words, become a pattern contaminated by contemporary
evils (HIV, war, terrorism, car bombing) due to man’s neo-barbarism.
Lionel Loetscher uses an entire shapes’ repository
that one can link to the innocent and inoffensive childhood world (alphabetic
noodles, virtual landscape referring to video games, models as projected
space of a created ideal world, wallpaper referring to the sweet outdatedness
of grand Pa and grand Ma) that he distorts with the cold, clinical, violent
world of adults.
As seductive as a model forest in a sink or on tiles can
appear to us, it makes us think of the clinical, cold, white, tiled atmosphere
of our habitat, to the contamination, the moisture. The warmth of an old
flowery wallpaper is contradicted by the coldness of a Tank modern design,
a bomb shell. All in all, the containers and the contents merge, confront
themselves, collide into each other, cross-breed. The virtual “high
pastures” are not an invitation to play, to site seeing, they become
a battlefield. The spotless whiteness of digigraphy is contaminated by the
ostentatious ornament of floral motifs. Is Man either the contaminant or
the contaminated in his own culture of nature? These same wallpapers with
warmth, comfort evocation, take on a more warlike dimension, the one of
a bacteriological culture.
« Dream/reality », « being/appearing
», « child/adult » so many dualities more than appropriate
in our society preaching the show business, leisure’s, the playful,
the festive and the eugenics. The Conflicting relationships we maintain
with those “things-concepts”, those “sorts of space”,
are as many manifestations of our physiological illnesses as well as psychological.
From there, one can understand this path as an initiation to adulthood.
[Landscape/territory]
In the artist work, talking about wonders, curiosities
and interrogating this traditional duality Nature/Culture – Culture
comprised in its widest meaning which integrates art, science, technologies,…
bring us to question nature domestication by man through the invention of
landscape.
To understand his relationship to the world, to his surrounding
man created procedures, observation protocols which uses technology. The
invention of Landscape starts with these observation protocols. Thanks to
optics, the surrounding is looked at through magnifying glasses, isolated,
conditioned by a whole scientific machinery in order to observe and comprehend
the world. Then, man has conceived images. The hypothesis is to experience
the real in a procedure that one has elaborated. From it, one can infer
laws, sciences and we, in fact, have blindly put our faith in this procedure.
In the artistic field, these procedures mainly governed by science, take,
according to the era, the name of pinhole camera, quadratura, perspective,
camera obscura, photographic camera, computer generated image, etc. They
shape our discernment in order to set the world as world.. Each era and
each cultural territory had their own truths (the golden figure, the perspective,
the resemblance effect and the one of plausibility) on reality relationship
to our representation of the world. We truly know that the way to represent
is only the result of a consensus, a matter of schools, academy, religious
or political ideologies. It is even the sum of documents, scientific, cultural,
social, and religious knowledge. It is an intimate and collective experience
of our own grasp of a reality. The image catalyses and synchronizes the
observation between the world and us. Thus this distance would be the image
taking shape in consciousness.
In this principle, today, our manner to apprehend the world via the image,
would be a generic knowledge which all in all justify our attitudes and
operational procedures in observing the world.
The study of optics during the Renaissance, with the rediscovery
of Euclid, tries to bring to the fore all the rules which govern nature.
This is what Alberti is doing when, for the first time, he outlines the
technical basis allowing drawing an accurate perspective. He completes his
explanation with this argument: representing our surrounding world requires
form the artist, a scientific knowledge of the laws that govern it.
As in all processes « learning » (practical
experience, knowledge, skills, behavioral or cultural values acquisition
process) which consist in acquiring or modifying a background representation
in order to allow with it, efficient or more and more efficient interactions,
which follow the observation, imitation, trial, rehearsal, presentation
phase. Born from perspective, landscape (nature’s icon) is a shifting
space from the artificial to the natural, and makes objects visible in space.
It is an invention which gives rise to a sensitive reality, but we are not
conscious of our perception tricks. The satisfaction feeling that we experience
when facing a landscape is the implicit shape waiting for its “filling”,
its fulfilling. Thus the implicit character of landscape comes from the
feeling of its perfection. Our astonishment, dizziness comes from the fact
that we are able to have such a feeling in front of, so unnatural but constructed
assembled parts.
With the landmarks transformation due to the space boom,
the landscape notion, unavoidably, undergoes a crisis. Not because of the
deteriorations that man inflicts on the soil, the climate, the fauna and
flora, but because the formal system on which the landscape notion relies
is collapsing when confronted to the discovery of infinite virtual spaces.
Are appearing words such as “Site” simultaneously meaning the
real (geography) and the virtual (information technology). Technological
naturalization, cultural adaptation of nature, Space is central to Lionel
Loetscher thoughts.
From the French Garden to the web site, spaces turn geometric.
They are centered, squared, processed. These spaces in the artiste work
become in turns container-content, processed, adjusted, physically, symbolically,
esthetically. On the substance as well as the forms, the questions put forward
by Lionel Loetscher using the wonderful, the floral motif, the creation
of a model landscape, as virtual confronted, stacked up, juxtaposed to a
white minimal space , geometrical, clinical, create a tectonic.Lionel Loetscher
universe is the superposition of a French garden and a chess board. His
artistic projects are topographies, cartographies which fluctuate between
embellishment scheme and site development scheme. The tectonics of two worlds
: childhood and adulthood, imaginary/real, virtual/real, contemplation/experimentation,
art/science, nature/culture, offer to us, for our own visual delight, a
garden with an esthetic and symbolic ambition which bring to its apogee
the art to amend nature in order to impose symmetry within.
He expresses a desire to glorify in the plant kingdom,
the triumph of order over disorder, culture over wild nature, of the reflective
over the spontaneous. Located onto a heightened terrace, the viewer grasps
at a glance the layout of a garden whose harmony is cleverly calculated
in the design of the borders and water surfaces usage, compartments foliage
arranged on geometric surfaces, planes and axes ordered symmetrically. This
French garden offers compartments occupied by vegetal embroidery (wall paper).
Then…
Within the contemplation, terror, doubt, insidiously interferes.
Nature is tamed, organized, ordered according to scientific principles.
The art magic is, bit by bit, shaken by science reality. From landscapes,
we shift towards a territory which applies the same geometric principles:
the chessboard. The pieces laying in it can be beautiful. But there, only
remains the principle ruling this world which freezes us: the victory of
the reflective over the spontaneous, order, manipulation, layout, contamination;
Nature is in a test tube, packaged, for the best of the worlds. A new order
is established in this photography. 64 squares, 2 sides, the RSG, defines
for us rows : horizontal lines, columns: vertical lines, diagonals, on center
: the 4 center squares (d4, e4, d5, e5) , the side rows.
Tree in d4, us, in e5: check to the king !! Let us avoid
check mat!
Lothar move, 1999 Versailles Game.
Response: Copenhagen defence.
There is no environmental claim in Lionel Loetscher work,
simply an experiment. Inside the green house of our [Specimen] contaminated
by the exhalation of an initiatory kit of a young chemist in turmoil, our
need for nature is filled by a dream effect gas.
Lionel Geny
*Lothar hurricane 1999 Versailles – Estimated cost: 1.6 billions
€.
**Copenhagen Climat Summit held in 2009..
