David Altmejd’s retrospective in Paris: nightmares have never been so beautiful

 

 

Remember, what you see is just a sculpture. All the gigantic ants, reptiles, broken mirrors, strange flowers, sharp fangs, crystals, fake jewels, disturbing holes that you will spot here and there at the seminal exhibition the Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris is devoting to David Altmejd (until 1st February 2015) are just elements requiring a basic sculptural approach. They are not related to any external area of knowledge, or storytelling, and it would be a mistake to put them in the realm of the ready made, even if, in effect, they have not been shaped by the hands of artist. On the contrary, they have to be considered simply as words of a personal vocabulary.

 

It follows that the hyper elaborated three dimensional pieces that the 40-year-old Canadian artist presents in Paris, part of them coming from his early career and some others made specifically for this show, are the kind of artworks for which the beholder doesn’t need any related, or additional, information. He is just asked to stand and look carefully. The concept behind them, their simple software, lies in the artist’s will of generating objects of beauty, possibly talking about the human beings and their destiny.

 

What Almejd is suggesting about us is pretty easy to figure out, and is similar to what has been said by artists like Salvator Dalí, as proved by the stairs inside the right leg of “The Giant (2006); Lucio Fontana, quoted by every hole Altmejd digs, and by each crystal he places; Francis Bacon, not only for the distortions of the faces Altmejd often applies, but also for the perfect geometric frame into which the subjects are placed; Anselm Kiefer, for the kind of attention the German artist pays to each minuscule details and his peculiar use of figuration. For all of them, and for Altmejd too, the fundamental message of art is that human beings are made of infinity, beauty and fear.

 

Moreover, Almejd pays a special tribute to lighting and colour, and that is probably his real trademark. A sophisticated mixture of warm and cold light enhanced by mirrors characterizes each single group of pieces, and particularly the ambitious The Flux and The Puddle. This “summa” of the artist’s art practice, especially composed for this show, owes a considerable part of its extraordinary visual strength to the unique light’s temperature in the room. The fresh, pure, airy, and clean atmosphere turns the obsession for details – that sometimes are not even visible to the public, as claimed by the artist – into an extraordinary pleasant and funny experience.

 

The last reference we would like to underline is the one connected to the representation of the movement that Almejd puts up each time he applies to sculpture certain elements like, for example, his hands. The artist himself has revealed that his hands are represented on the bodies of “The body builder” series, while “shaping” them. In this case the tribute is of course to the research made by Futurists and Cubists – Marcel Duchamp included – at their time. However, while many artists since then have tried to represent through sculpture and painting the reality around them, seldom the artists have represented themselves while creating the artwork itself. Only certain photographers do so.

 

October 13, 2014