©Emilie Breux
EYES WIDE CUT / WHEN NATURE TAKES SHAPE
Emilie Breux’s practice draws on highly classical genres, from landscape to ruin, from nature to still life, to propose an active dialogue with the world around her and the presences it holds. This here and now is woven together with a set of elements belonging both to the work itself and to the relationships maintained with the genesis of a place. For the artist, art can reactivate the past and pass the baton.
At the Hortillonnages, a hybrid territory between garden, wasteland and cultivated landscape, Eyes Wide Cut resonates with the history of the Île aux Fagots, where wood gathered from the land was once bundled into faggots and transported by water by the hortillons. By working exclusively with naturally fallen trees, Emilie Breux extends this ancient gesture, one that remains respectful of living things. In this landscape shaped by water, earth and wood, sections of trees lie on the ground, sometimes clustered, sometimes scattered, as if left there by time. At first glance, the installation blends into the landscape. Then something unsettles the eye : certain sections, cut in two, reveal eyes. Watchful figures or sleeping presences, these gazes emerging from the grain of the wood lend these tree fragments an anthropomorphic dimension.
The title Eyes Wide Cut reinforces the idea of wound, of cut and irreversibility: a “cut to the quick” for a “raw gaze”. Wood becomes both subject and tool, raw material and language. Through a precise act of marquetry, rigorous and respectful, the artist reveals a presence without imposing a form. The tree, though fallen and fragmented, seems to retain something living. It still watches. It keeps vigil. A confrontation takes place between the section and the marquetry, between the raw and the crafted, between the natural and the artificial, between the tree’s original verticality and its horizontal destiny as a work of art. Because we are no longer certain of their permanence, trees, once reaching upward toward the light, appear reduced to fragments : sectioned, displaced, transformed. Yet in Eyes Wide Cut, they are not reduced to silence. They become witnesses to the past, to the present imposed upon them, and to the future they seem to question. The gaze they direct at the visitor is an invitation to observe differently, to relinquish the assumption of a right of oversight over nature and to accept, perhaps, being looked at by it. A great protagonist of the living world and a marker rooted in the real, the tree can here become a passage into an imaginary world.
Eyes Wide Cut is a frontal work, the soul of a place, a guardian that draws the spectator into a sensory experience of time and space, offering a perspective on the ephemeral and on all that is perishable and fragile.
Project realised with the support of Nolwenn Dantan / BUZZWOOD