Candide's Garden

About

SETAREH is thrilled to present Candide’s Garden, an exhibition by artist Wolfgang Betke.

Wolfgang Betke's vibrant paintings and sculpture foreground the conditions and processes of creation through the medium of paint; the lengthly application and removal of paint on the canvas becomes a cipher to reveal the duration of its genesis. Betke describes these painted objects as traces of a pronounced ‘bodily automatism’. This neologism is a continuation of the surrealist terms ‘lyrical automatism’ or ‘psychic automatism’. 

The exhibition Candide’s Garden derives its title from the final lines of Voltaires novel, where after a horrendous sequences of events the hero takes advice from a valiant old man who explains that everybody should tend to their own garden. Like Voltaire, Betke holds up both shadow and light to reveal the entropic conditions of Modernism and celebrate the beauty of life even amongst the detritus of our ravaged landscape.