POLITICAL ECOLOGY FIVE ARTISTS FROM FRANCE CURATED BY PIERRE RESTANY FEBRUARY 24 – APRIL 14, 2001

“Everything has already been said, everything has already been seen! This observation is the outcome of today’s global culture. This globalizing impact of our urban culture offers us a chance: to reactivate the old concepts, the old images, the old facts, to bring them the existential freshness of the present. To see other things other ways, to recharge the motive power of the image or the object—this is the goal of political ecology, whose emergence may still be marginal, but is powerful, and conditions the current Parisian urban culture.” —Pierre Restany

Political Ecology: The title underlines the common concern of these five artists, who concentrate on the relationship between subjects and objects in their global environment. They employ a complex range of multimedia forms. These artists acting as the spin doctors of our global information, enable us to perceive familiar properties in a new synchronism.

Pierre Restany, acclaimed art theorist and critic, selected these artists whose works define concepts relating to contemporary ecological contradictions. Informed by France’s new experimental metaphysics, these five artists deconstruct the old idea of Nature-versus-Culture in favor of a new politics of Human-with-Nonhuman.

Gilles Barbier’s organized chaos combines buffoonery and materiality. His strategy is meticulous and compulsive, questioning scientific progress and humanistic faith. Carlos Ginzburg has played a key role in formulating a fractal model for art. His work continues to involve a three-part method: deconstruction, dissemination and fractality, which in the end, favors chaotic visual data. Joel Hubaut’s multimedia situations confound the boundaries of painting, sculpture, video, performance and sound. This dimensionality sets off an alarm signal for our “diseased organism”. Saverio Lucariello media works develop human-sized photographic montages juxtaposing incongruous images of the artist in neutral, uneventful landscapes. Barthélémy Toguo explores a pilgrimage between African and Western cultures. His compositions of sculpture, photos, video and text comment on social mores including political migrations, sexuality and commercial advertising.

Special Thanks To: French Embassy, New York, Étant Donnés – The French American Fund for Contemporary Art  galerie du jour – agnes b, Paris  traphot.com, “l’image dans tout ses états”, Montrouge 92