Céline Cléron’s exhibits very often arise from a shift or a telescoping of things. She likes to establish a web of communication between history and nature, art and archaeology, or classical works. Her creations bring to mind numerous images, each image revealing another, and evoking stories where fabulous things are born from the prosaic while bringing a strange temporality to the present.
In her exhibit, ironically titled Nature permanente, she humorously mixes the archetype of female anti-seduction – the curler – with the romantic and ornamental aura of the weeping willow described in literature as the tree of melancholy and nostalgic memory.
Nature permanente is a cross between, a telescoping between the «hair» of the weeping willow and an apparition almost animist, like a ghostly presence weaving a link between plant and human. The object «curler» makes the weeping willow the subject and anthropomorphises it, bringing it into the human sphere, giving it an ancestral «spirit» in the manner of animist ontologies.
The Fagots Island takes on the air of a sacred forest…
For the artist, the relationship to memory like the game is woven into the distraction, like a persistent tension between what is fixed and what is in motion, between permanence and impermanence, origins and evolution, fundamentals and inventions, the balance is played out in the mischievousness of the artist and the pleasure of the visitor.
The artist
Céline Cléron