Artists: Pedro Barateiro, Simon Bergala, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky, Samir Ramdani, Melanie Smith, Jessica Warboys
Exhibition title: IL PLEUT, TULIPE
Curated by: Elfi Turpin
Venue: CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France
Date: February 18 – May 13, 2018
Photography: Aurélien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, SALTS and CRAC Alsace
IL PLEUT, TULIPE is an exhibition shaped from the margins of a notebook, from the territory of signs, words, images – virtual beings existing outside all language.
IL PLEUT, TULIPE is an exhibition from the shadow realm: not that it is hidden from the sun by something or somebody (although relations of dominance do get redefined here) or that the shadow in question is being manipulated by puppet masters; but because shadow has an existence of its own, just like rain, a plant, an animal, an image or a sign – subjectivities interacting in the world .
IL PLEUT, TULIPE gathers together artists tuned in to these alternative beings and their affective interconnections; artists haunted by potentialities whose voices are in the minority or muffled, but with which they converse or form alliances.
IL PLEUT, TULIPE thus speaks to intersubjectivity between artists, the public and these free entities; intersubjectivity as the very locus of the making of art, triggering the implosion of the old nature/culture dichotomy.
IL PLEUT, TULIPE brings together Kevin from South Central, in working-class Los Angeles, with a passion for art and a rapper inside his head; off-the-wall paintings vibrant with the urge to make relationships visible in a space where differences rub shoulders but have no clear meaning for each other; a film driven by the needs, appetite and instincts of its own images; bodies colonised and devoured by austerity and a weevil; paintings born of an alliance of sea, wind, sand, the hand and pigments, overlaid with petrified bodies; and a multitude of beings caught up in the same summer night conspiracy in some tropical Japanese suburb.
IL PLEUT, TULIPE is at once a poem* addressing a flower, a dog** and an anagram that has one L too few; and a dog and a flower addressing a poem and an anagram that has one L too many.
– E. T., January 2018.
