Éden ou le jardin retrouvé ? (Eden or the Garden Regained ?)

Thibault Laget-Ro, À deux pas d’Eden, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 81 cm

The Galerie Nathalie Béreau proposes a subjective variation on the Garden of Eden. With “Eden or the garden regained?” and the works of 11 artists of the gallery, the question of our relationship to what we have lost – the garden of delights – is raised, what we risk losing definitively or what we should build again in a harmonious relationship with Nature. Each artist, through his or her work, takes us on a walk where poetry and reflection are mixed.

Yann Bagot

The artist will present a series of drawings made in situ “with Indian ink on paper, on the Breton coast, in the open air. These ink and paper corals are shaped by a series of experimental protocols that combine in a game of successive traces and erasures. Interventions on the material of the inks, revelatory baths in sea water, masks with fresh water, effects of salt crystals on Indian ink: my drawing practice is nourished by my environment and the natural forces that surround me, in dialogue with gestures close to experimental photography and engraving, questioning the frontiers of contemporary drawing.”
“At the time of the anthropocene, these sentinels of the seas are particularly threatened. Fascination, multitude, blindness, disappearance, ghosts. Precious heritages with extreme fragility.”

Michaël Cailloux

From copper plate to etching, the artist deploys his sensitive virtuosity of line in an abundant composition.  A marvellous garden where nature joyfully expresses itself for our visual pleasure. At the limit of the compositions of the Rorschach tests, we are invited to reverie, to dive into the cobalt blue. Serenity through balance.

Anne Laval

Forest of bones 2021 – installation
“This work is made of porcelain modelled on resistance wire (steel that goes into the kiln) one after the other to be fired, -which gives it a cracked appearance- then braided. It is a meditative and long work, each strand of porcelain goes through a thought and it is part of the work. I always give a symbol to my materials: porcelain has always been that of the bone. Once braided, the branches appeared as fine as hair. I had the feeling that I had to make enough of them to have the impression of a forest of bones and I remembered the story by Claude Ponti where Okilélé entered the forest of the witch who was made of bones. It had always fascinated me to think that perhaps in another world our dead would grow back!”
Beyond this recollection, Anne Laval plays on varied and complex levels of reading, which function like layers. Childhood, the porcelain-bone association, the white forest – a new page of a dead nature, desertified, like that of dead corals, but which at the same time can live again. The human being, the source of this rebirth, the source of cycles that are perhaps not yet completely broken. A suspended forest ready to take root again.

Atsuko Ishii

From the chaos of the stones emerge dinosaurs, a spiral of butterflies, a young woman running… Like a magician, Atsuko Ishii creates surrealistic compositions through engraving, evocative of her imagination but also of what she captures from the world.

This farandole of butterflies creates a vertiginous movement accentuated by the encyclical nature of the puddle on which the foot seems to float.
The world seems to turn upside down, the roots of the trees in the sky, how to find one’s way?

Caroline Bouyer

Begun in 2020, the series of  “Paysages autonomes” evolves, grows, and is always renewed in the spirit of dreamlike landscapes, those of the artist Caroline Bouyer. Between reality and imagination, composed of a multitude of signs and fragments that she picks up “while walking through life, with a notebook in her hand. These representations translate a common desire in our current societies, to walk in the opposite direction to that of a civilised and urbanised environment. This series illustrates the outcome of a regular withdrawal and an abandonment to the powers of the imagination and wandering, of a journey.
All the drawings are independent of each other but have in common drawn or engraved elements that intertwine and conceal themselves.”

Saskia Bertrand

Remains of the day in the sanatoria of the former USSR
Sanatoriums flourished in the southern republics of the USSR in the 20th century, providing rest, rehabilitation and holiday accommodation. Abandoned after the break-up of the Soviet empire, they bear the mark of the slow disintegration of the former USSR at the dawn of the 21st century and of the eternal nostalgia of the Russian diasporas of yesterday and today.
But what exactly explains the charm of this era, which is fading in the face of a reconquering nature? The nostalgia of days spent in a countryside conquered beyond the infinite horizons of the Russian plain? The blossoming of a singular architecture sheltered from Western influence?
A backdrop for a scene that is not trompe-l’oeil but life-size?
And what if the illusion was here, today as in the past, in the foreground? Objects rendered hopelessly static, inanimate leaves despite the draughts that run through the interior of the buildings, finish by transforming the remains of a glorious day into the decorum of an entrance hall.
Through this game of confusion for the spectator, the sun seems to cause a break with the past and to give shape to a new life that has gained in strength and authenticity. A human life without political support and privilege, subject to the time needed to find its independence.

Coco Téxèdre

From nature to women, her two favourite subjects, Coco Téxèdre has created a series of drawings in 2021 entitled “Femme”.
Taking up the idea of panties that she had developed with “Les Châtelaines”, the artist creates here, from a motif that evokes femininity, an osmosis between the earth and the woman: from the ground, plants and lace-like flowers bloom.
The woman as the matrix of a new earth.

Jean-Christophe Ballot

The Auteuil greenhouses were created in 1761 under Louis XV, redesigned at the end of the 19th century by Jean Camille Formigé and are listed as Historic Monuments. They are a fine example of 1900 style architecture, sculptures, Rodin among others, French and Japanese gardens, etc. and collections of rare plants and remarkable trees.
In 2015, Jean-Christophe Ballot photographed them before the restructuring of the garden on the occasion of the extension of Roland Garros.
The photographer’s approach is to reveal the beauty and poetry of a place of collection with the dreamy image of a lost paradise to be found again. He thus makes reference to the cabinet of curiosities and wonders of the Renaissance. Through this work, all the poetry and imagination of the garden, the perfection and diversity of Mother Nature are revealed to us. The gates of Eden open up to us…

Maryline Pomian

With the series of sculptures entitled “Pierre votive” (Votive Stone), created in the course of 2020, Maryline Pomian continues to approach cigarette paper in a different form. Using drawings from her discarded manuscript “Quand le verbe fait forme”, she creates a new work whose meaning and form evoke the Zen garden. A reflection on our attitude to rejection in a new incarnation.
Placed on a mirrored brass plate, the “Pierre votive” becomes a precious object, metamorphosed, highlighted. Another look at the garden…

Véronique Pineau

Véronique Pineau creates her works from crockery, from abandoned objects that she tirelessly hunts for and that have fascinated her since childhood. From her discoveries, she creates compositions in which the object is diverted from its primary function to become a part of an improbable assembly. Zero waste, everything is transformed, just as the garden reinvents itself with each season. White harmonises each element, giving a synthetic, uncluttered vision of the garden idealised by man, where the domesticated animal also finds its place, like this little rabbit.

Thibault Laget-Ro

His paintings emanate a colourful feeling of plenitude that hides a more violent reality, that of migration, exodus and exile. In this new series from 2021 entitled “A deux pas d’Éden”, Thibault Laget-Ro develops a luxuriant nature, perhaps that of a rediscovered Paradise where man cultivates the earth, his new earth, in harmony with a beneficent vegetation.
The new Eldorado to be built.