Artist: Eric Giraudet de Boudemange
Exhibition title: 4 Rivières
Venue: Villa du Parc – Centre d’art contemporain d’intérêt national, Annemasse, France
Date: October 7, 2023 – January 21, 2024
Photography: ©Aurelien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Villa du Parc – Centre d’art contemporain d’intérêt national
“This year 4 Rivières has selected La Villa du Parc as the place to offer an experience ‘in the flow’ imagined by the artist Eric Giraudet de Boudemange. The 4 rivières exhibition plays with a synergy between contemporary art and the wellness industry. The brand, known for its campaigns touting the revitalizing virtues of water that has been magnetized by the largest therapists of the Alps, has given free reign to the artist to develop a journey of the senses in the cycle of water. He has made a daring choice to follow the beneficial element but against its natural flow, going back from the bubbling spring to its origins in the atmosphere. In this way he builds an immersive experience, which takes the playful and attractive aspects of the forms that have driven the marketing success of 4 rivières and fuses them to a profound symbolic dimension of water as an elementary material that is primordial. The unseen but associated ethical and economic aspects are also given their due, proof that the brand welcomes self-reflection and the dynamics of criticism.
Visitors to the show will discover installations, wall paintings, sculptures, and videos composing a total environment that merges water, landscape, and the body. Pretested by a sample of consumers, the concept has drawn mixed reactions that are often intense and never indifferent. This journey, a close-up focus on the watery element, offers visitors the chance to feel physical metamorphoses they have never even suspected exist, fostered by fluids and interactions that are sometimes repulsive, and reinforced by the environmental challenges of our day and age, which the water of 4 rivières works to conjure up and heal. Now it’s each and every visitor’s chance to experience and decide for themselves, starting 7 October.”
Eric Giraudet de Boudemange is a French artist born in 1983.
He lives between Paris and Amsterdam. He studied at Ensba, Paris, the Fresnoy and the Rijksakademie.
His projects are based on fieldwork developed during several re-sidencies. In France, he created a pigeon club at CAC Brétigny or worked on the vernacular traditions on the island of Ouessant at Finis Terrae. He collaborated with a Cajun healer in Deltaworkers at the New Orleans ; He also worked around a sportive tradition in Dutch landscape in Kunsthuis Syb, etc.
In 2023, his works were exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, in the gallery Martin van Zomeren, and at the Tale of a Tub art centre in the Netherlands. He has benifited from solo exhibitions at the Fries Museum in Punt WG (2017, Netherlands), at the Centre d’art les Capucins in Embrun (France, 2019) and at the Lily Robert gallery in Paris (2019).
He has made several performances at the Centre Pompidou, at the Ricard Foundation, la Criée Art centre and Le Cyclop in the Forest of Fontainebleau near Paris.
