Covered in white cloth, casted molds of palm tree’s trunks lie across metal supports, while some molded soil hangs on the walls as if they are paintings. The viewer feels troubled by what they are seeing: the “palm tree” has a realistic shape but is white and horizontal; soil looks like soil but is not on the floor but on the walls. Everything is turned upside down. You are at La Force de l’Art, in front of a work of Didier Marcel -“Phoenix Canariensis”- who is present at this major French exhibition of contemporary art for his second year.
Are you upset in front of his work? Do you feel as though you are loosing your wits? This is precisely the goal of Didier Marcel’s work, which leads to the viewer’s a reflection on their perception of his/her environment and also on the construction and regulation of nature. Didier Marcel leads people to build a new relationship with what surrounds them. He has an original interpretation of space: the public no longer just walks around the sculpture, the sculpture occupies the space and takes over the viewer. The audience has a new experience with art, where one’s perception is disturbed, and the world, as one knows, it is overthrown.
Didier Marcel plays with real and unreal, making the two contradicting themes combine into the same object, building a new landscape, which rocks from nature to art.
La Force de l’Art 02
From April 24th to June 1st
Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill 75008 Paris
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