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Elle et le chemin

Elle et le chemin : La Visitation, exposition ELLE ET LE CHEMIN, 2022, Nicolas Alquin, Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud © Gautier Deblonde   


The exhibition


"I have nothing to tell you that you don't already know: this inalienable equality before the void, the horror of the void, the sovereignty of the void," wrote Christian Bobin, who died on November 23, 2022, just three days before the inauguration of the exhibitions and Christmas residencies at Fontevraud. Although the poet of The Pure Presence, who kept photographs of trees rather than men or women in his wallet, always declined to comment on Nicolas Alquin's woods of solitude - claiming that he could only write about people close to him - the least of his aphorisms seems destined for this sculptor of the ruins of the sky. Bringing back trunks and slabs from demolition sites as well as from the forested country of the Ivory Coast or the Apache reserves of Arizona, Alquin carves the trees of the Earth as if he were praising nothing, working around a void - that of the boat or the violin - which always leaves a place for the other, the visitor, the seer. Called upon to make an exhibition on the theme of the Nativity in the desecrated royal abbey of Fontevraud, a frightening prison decreed by Napoleon - which gave Jean Genet "the strongest impression of distress and desolation" - and today restored as the necropolis of the Plantagenet monarchs and a museum of modern art, The artist who stands "where everything fades away" wanted to search for the graciosa, the beauty that one feels in the soul, to sculpt his Christmas night.

Extract from the article by Emmanuel Daydé published in the N°104 de la revue Art Absolument. Published February 3, 2023

When


26/11/2022 - 06/03/2023