[…] The Shadow: But shadows are more timid than men: you will not tell anyone of the way in which we conversed together.
Traveler: What should I do?
The shadow: Walk under these pines and look around you towards the mountains, the sun is setting.
Traveler: Where are you? Where are you ?
Excerpt from the text The traveler and his shadow (1880) by Friedrich Nietzsche
It is under the aegis of this enigmatic reference to Nietzsche that the artist Pascal Grandmaison places his most recent exhibition at the Blouin Division gallery. A presentation made up of six projects, including two new video installations, which, according to the presentation text, “tell us in a different way a quest for understanding” of this world, a quest which would invite us to create “a multiform artistic object” allowing develop “a vision tool”. An intelligent project on the function of art in our societies.
Don’t try to dive into it hoping to find a literal illustration of a prefabricated thought. For 25 years, Grandmaison has created original and unique art. And there is nothing here of a superficial social commitment that would reduce art to a moral or ethical tool simply thanks to the content it addresses. Certainly, the visitor will sometimes have the feeling that Grandmaison is moving towards an art that addresses the major issues of our contemporary world. The question of our relationships with nature seems, among other things, present…
In the video installation titled Noise reducers (2023), the artist shows us a close-up of plants that tremble, shaken, shaken each time a strange noise is heard. As if this nature were attacked by a machine that we never see appear, but which haunts the image even more, present only by the blows it delivers. We anxiously await a frightening outcome… The presentation text also speaks of the “global geopolitical upheavals” which await us and which make “the line between reality and fiction seem ever thinner”. But here, no representations of media stars, politicians, real people or wannabe dictators… Grandmaison immerses us in works often bordering on abstraction. We certainly recognize nature here, there the feet of a walker — in the video installation Splitting or displacement of self (2023)… But these figurative images slowly seem to close in on a more opaque materiality, a formal work which will require deeper reflection from its viewer.
In order to see things more clearly, we must certainly return to the footsteps of Traveler and his shadow (1880) by Nietzsche and the analysis made by the philosopher Éric Blondel. Made up of 350 aphorisms, separate fragments, which do not constitute a logical sequence, this text invites the reader to develop cross-links. According to Nietzsche, who already denounced in the 19the century “hurried readers”, readers in search of simple ideas, these ruptures force individuals to “ruminate” on their thoughts. Would the philosopher and the artist therefore be travelers, walkers, wandering beings who must find in the shadows of the world the true and the authentic, apart from the false interpretation that reason sometimes imposes from a prefabricated way? This is a fight against the systems that must affect us. Would art and its necessary opacity (among other things formal) be stated as the only force that makes life and our world bright and acceptable again?
When he talks about art, Grandmaison also makes references to Matter and memory by Henri Bergson, to the writings of Deleuze on The time image or the reflections on Didi-Huberman’s fireflies… For those like me who are worried about the decline of theory in contemporary art approaches, this is an approach that does not lack strength. It is part of a philosophical trend in contemporary art in which we could place both the work of Carl Trahan and that of Thomas Hirschhorn.