Graines at the 104 in Paris
Nhan Duc’s installation Le Parloir des souhaits (The Wishing Parlour, 2021). Photo credit: Quentin Chevrier
For several years now, Parisian institutions have been putting on exhibitions with more outward-looking perspectives, concerned less with the time-worn formulas of colour and line, and more with the politics of identity or climate change. This curatorial shift has been a long time coming. Paris is, after all, the city where Maurice Denis first entreated artists and the viewing public to consider the formal quantities of works of art above their symbolic or narrative content. In the opening line to his Définition du néo-traditionalisme, Denis famously stated: ‘a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order.’
But recently, despite the occasional Picasso blockbuster, there has been a concerted effort on the part of museums to show art and artists concerned with ecology, feminism and, to a lesser extent, the struggles or joy of queer life.
A recent contribution to this trend is ‘Graines, the exhibition! A brief subjective history of Seeds’ at the Centquatre in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. The unusual exhibition presents a selection of seeds from the collection of the French National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) alongside works of art by Thierry Ardouin, Fabrice Hyber, Duy Anh Nhan Duc, and Jade Tang. A long frieze-like painting by Hyber, part gestural abstraction, part scientific chart, is the first thing that visitors encounter after descending a ramp into the building’s lower-level. As an exhibition about seeds, naturally, it takes place underground and in the dark. Hyber’s untitled work evokes an evolutionary timeline, moving chromatically and chronologically from warm tones and embryonic seed pods to cool tones and a walking humanoid figure. As a visual introduction or manifesto for the show, the message is quite clear: humans and seeds spring from a common primordial ancestor and both belong to the family of living things. Given the climate change subtext of the exhibition, Hyber might have considered starting his chronology with cool colors and warming his palette as he arrived at humanity. This would have more clearly illustrated the connection between ecological degradation and human activities.
