Body Poetic. Body Mythic.

About

On our Regent's Canal houseboat gallery, Slash Arts is proud to present this exclusive exhibition from Paris: 'Body Poetic Body Mythic'.

Thierry Cauwet (b.1958) lives and works in Paris and will be present at the exhibition. He has exhibited in France and internationally since 1978 including at the Venice Biennale (1984) and Paris Biennale (1981). He began as a performance and video artist but has focussed on painting and installation since 1988. His art is in numerous collections including French public collections (Pompidou Centre, Musee National d'Art Moderne). He taught in the French dependencies of Martinique and Reunion before setting up his own at school in Paris: Atelier 115. See @thierrycauwet

Artist's Statement:

Presentation of the human body or its political or poetical representation, in space and time, in parallel planes, is a constant in my work.

I always find it difficult to know whether I am at the end of a series or artwork, or whether I am beginning a new one. In 2017 I ended my Osiris series, or at least I thought I had, as later I restarted it through collage and cut-outs (such as Seth and Isis), through performances, and through 'Le Cendrier d’Osiris' project. The future of this series is for me like the quest for the inaccessible star in Jacques Brel's song. 

My work is as much about ideas as it is about form, in its actuality as much as in its historicity. There is in my work something which derives from archaeology as conceived by Giorgio Agamben - 'a means if accessing the present'. Arche is an ancient Greek philosophical concept which reflects on the origins of the world from which all flows. The word is peculiar in that it combines beginning and command, place of origin and access to the present. Like the alchemist’s birds, soaring up to free the soul, that might sing the words 'begin and command'. From where and how?

I am also drawn to Greek mythology for another reason. For me, the brutality of 2015-16 terrorist attacks in France confirmed a regression, a return to dogmatic religious thought, and it seemed necessary to oppose this development through my art, to reconnect to ancient Greek philosophy, a different source of occidental culture. Hesiod writes in Theogony that 'in the beginning there was Chaos'. Then Gaia, the earthmother of all life, gave birth to Uranus who was castrated by his son Chronos. Whether this was the Chronos of time or not (there are various theses) makes me wonder... What extraordinary poetic force - time emasculating the heavens. It's worthy of Antonin Artaud!

First Chaos, then Earth and the heavens, then the Titans like divine dinosaurs, and then gods and men. Not a bearded Demiurge creating the Earth, but rather the Earth creating gods - human gods, mortal gods. As Roger Gilbert-Lecomte says 'the ancient gods were only states of being of men, who took the form of gods when they entered these states'.