David de Tscharner, La Nature des Choses
La Nature des Choses, about the nature and course of things by David de Tscharner
"The primary bodies generate each other and exchange colours and even proprieties from times immemorial"
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Bn PROJECTS and Maison Grégoire are very pleased to invite you to the opening of La Nature des Choses, the project specially conceived and developed by David de Tscharner for the architectural shrine of Maison Grégoire.
Between its inspiration by and nominal quotation of Lucretius for the title (De Rerum Natura), the more indirect and mediated reference to Fischli and Weiss (Der Lauf der Dinge id est The Course of Things ), the project subtly engages the visitor with its playful, aesthetic, political and philosphical implications.
David de Tscharner’s practice is in the "doing", in the absorption, assimilation and continuously reformulation of ideas, materials and objects, often of a very mundane & daily provenance.
His work rests on a continuous process of experiment, deriving both its form and structure from it. It thus readily welcomes and integrates the random and indetermined character brought about by these casual encounters between technique, concepts and thoughts, which act as a seminal trigger for poetic illumination.
The unexpected findings and encounters which this brings about are usually joyful and surprising. This was particularly obvious in One Sculpture a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, a year-long creative project where de Tscharner integrated the discipline of creating sculptural objects on a daily basis, using found material in his immediate environment. The result, which was presented on simple wooden shelves in his Brussels gallery, revealed already his fascination for the use of hybrid and often poor materials, as well as his quest for the abolition of unnecessary aesthetic and disciplinary divides. The result consisted of liminal objects, with a strong poetical potential, and which could hardly be limited to a specific aesthetic category. Depending on the point of view, they could just as well be classified as pictorialist sculptures, engraved paintings or sculptural collages.
The mediatised transmutation of the mundane object, gathered in this case on the occasion of walks and promenades around the art centre, also underlies Fantasmagorie, a site-specific project presented at the FRAC Pays-de-la-Loire in Carquefou from October 2014 till January 2015. Revisiting the principle of the magic lantern, de Tscharner, exalting their poetic and pictorial potential, made them hardly recognizable and almost immaterial, through the simple and deliciously outdated device of kaleidoscopic projection.
At the origin of La Nature des Choses, there is de Tscharner’s fascination for XVIIIth century Encyclopaedia (as well as for similar natural history and botanical prints and vella), combined with a desire to explore the potential of transmutation of a contemporary material such as plexiglass. The hollowed out, scratched and engraved plexi sculptural elements subsequently receive a pictorial / graphic treatment : Pigments and integrated, imbricated collages or fragments of images (whether randomly gathered or featuring elements of the architectural shrine offered by Maison Grégoire) are applied into the very matter of these sort of negative "low reliefs".
The primary idea of a revisited sculptural, mobile and articulated encyclopaedic plate has progressively made room in the course of the creative process, for forms and sculptural objects, occasionally echoing in their very shape the architecture of the space. Deliberately playing with and inbetween the notions of hollow, vacuum and relief, surface, volumetry and depth, a myriad of shapes will be presented to the viewer in sculptural boxes especially designed for this purpose.
In a way, the evolutive, process-based experimental input brought about by the concept and title of the exhibition as well as by the creative process will further prolong themselves in the experimentation of a number of possible displays.
On every opening day, there will thus be a great rewind and refresh. Week after week, the exhibition will be different, refashioned and remodeled by the curator and a selection of visitors.
It is therefore now up to us to play with De Tscharner’s U.A.O.’s (Unidentifiable Aesthetic Objects)....
Emmanuel Lambion
Opening on Wednesday 30 March 2016, 6 30- 9 p.m.
From 2/04/2016 till 18/06/2016 : each Saturday 2-6 p.m.
Maison Grégoire
Dieweg 292
B 1180 Brussel
www.maisongregoire.be
With the partnership of ART BRUSSELS