Alter Ego

Alter ego

This exhibition takes as its starting point the undeniable reality that we are part of nature, in other words, that nature is our alter ego.

By paying close attention to the organization and deployment systems of mosses, as well as to their extraordinary variety and capacity for resistance, Geneviève Dumont has met them and shared an incessant dialogue with them.

It is partly thanks to this particularly enduring and resilient plant world that our world expanded to develop a rhizome-based way of life. The artist’s interest in this mode of existence has led him to associate himself emotionally with their way of life, seeing them as his “other”. This empathy allows us to understand that there is a metabolic link between us and plants, just as there is with animals.

Contemporary anthropologist Charles Stépanoff specifies that “man’s imagination is trans-species”. Some human beings, perhaps more than others, have an “ecological intelligence” that enables them to interact with non-human alter egos.

Geneviève Dumont gives free rein to her perceptive ability to interact with the mosses in her landscapes, which radiate out from her zinc etchings.

Eric Audoubert, for his part, seeks dialogue with the vital energies of natural cycles, which he approaches with graphite pencil. Whether it’s atmospheric mutations or foliage swaying to the rhythm of the winds, it’s universal movement that mobilizes the artist.

With Eric Audoubert, our partner lies in the vital energy that links us to the cosmos. In his dialogue with the unmanageable and the invisible, the artist reminds us that a universal force animates us.

By creating tangles and intertwining currents of air and water, Eric Audoubert activates space on paper, or, in any case, he seeks to energize it to revive our gaze.

What both artists have in common is their attraction to landscapes, through which they can associate with nature at its most uncontrollable and ambiguous. We might ask: what is a landscape? and answer that its role is to invite us to unite with our environment. Just as it could, thanks to our two artists, initiate us into meditation.

With Genevève Dumont and Eric Audoubert, the primacy of exchanges with nature lies in the medium of drawing, which allows for a form of reciprocity and communion with nature, outside the language articulated by reason.

Geneviève Dumont uses the deployment of mosses in powerful networks to question their capacity to act and their autonomy. Eric Audoubert also tunes in to natural cycles to reveal the vital energy that connects us to them.

It’s not a question of exercising power, taking from or dominating the other person, but rather of recognizing his power to act and his skillful intelligence.

Simone Schuiten