LE PLATEAU,
FRAC ILE-DE-FRANCE France | Paris | 19e
SEPTEMBER 24, 2016-JANUARY 22, 2017
The Frac
Île-de-France and the Communauté d’agglomération de Marne et Gondoire host the
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature at the Château de Rentilly, as well as in
the Salle des Trophées, inviting the artist Richard Fauguet to curate the
exhibition based on the Museum collections. By drawing on the historic as well
as contemporary works in the collection and by introducing other pieces on loan
specifically for the exhibition, Richard Fauguet proposes a mise en abîme of
the fantasy world of the château, linked intrinsically to that of hunting, thus
inviting nature and the animal kingdom into the château.
A rarely
exhibited set of tapestries from the museum collections extending from the 16th
century to today structures the exhibition space. These very large wall
hangings become paintings/screens providing a means for the landscape to
feature within the château, therefore echoing the project by Xavier Veilhan,
who transformed it into a surface on which to project the surrounding park. The
château blends into the surrounding nature that, in turn, permeates its walls.
The
tapestries form a labyrinth throughout which works, small sculptures, ceramics
and paintings are gradually discovered. They form a bestiary that blithely
transcends periods and brings a wide range of styles and techniques into
juxtaposition.
The
counterpoint to a set of ceramic animal heads presented in the style of a
tiered cake is the ceramics by Johan Creten and Elmar Trenkwalder establishing
interplay between crafted and vernacular pieces and contemporary works. This is
a recurring element in Richard Fauguet’s work, often drawing from “modest” art
and artistic techniques or mediums that are now considered obsolete, therefore
establishing a degree of porosity between fields that are a priori deemed
incompatible. There is the same type of “collage” or overlap between a
collection of antique weapons with very sophisticated mechanisms confronting a
piece by Xavier Veilhan, formed of a series of very stylised guns. A collection
of paintings by Daniel Schlier depicting dogs looking at works of art is
positioned opposite a work by Richard Fauguet, Molécule de chien in an
unexpected flurry of canines.
Several
films and videos echo with this strange bestiary, including the masterpiece by
Fischli/Weiss, Le droit chemin/The Right Way, leading us into a world that is
poetic, bizarre and bucolic as well as imbued with existential questions.
Visual
confrontations also occur when the fragile graphic structure of Didier Marcel’s
deer sculptures or Patrick Neu’s armour face the imposing tapestries that
partition the space. Sculptures by Laurent Le Deunff – a papier mâché mammoth
and elephant trunks entangled like powerless hunting trophies –resonate with
the stuffed animals from the museum collections.
This world
of hunting or animal object of curiosity also puts the château and its history
into perspective, with the numerous animals that the park boasted, fallow deer,
horses, as well as a bear kept in a cage in the park during the period when the
Menier family owned the Rentilly estate, without forgetting the presence of a
penguin – whether a true story or a legend – and the existence of the salle des
trophées where the Menier family gathered after the hunt.
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