Maps in progress
Morgane Denzler
10 January > 5 March 2015
It's while climbing-descending that one enters the landscape, it is by crossing it from part to part that we spread it.
In Europe, the landscape is defined as " the part of a country which nature presents to an observer ", Man is thus placed at a distance. In China, the landscape forms a whole within which Man is perfectly integrated. Morgane Denzler relates the two concepts of the landscape and asks about its representation: how to conceive it physically, visually and conceptually? Through her photographic and the cartographic, the artist opens the field of the landscape and questions the difficult relationship existing between Man and Nature. In Europe, the landscape is guided by a constant « géométrisation ; a normalization which led to a reduction of the space a the human scale (in particular to the scale of the hand): it is codified, split up, measured, folded. The landscape is not thought in terms of an emotional and/or physical experience, but in terms of marks, juxtaposed images. It is the stripped for an optimal control of space. This authoritarian look applied on the landscape generates a distance between the human being and what surrounds it. On the contrary, the Chinese culture thinks about the human being in the landscape; He lives in fully, He is part of it and does not try to extract Himself; quite the opposite. In the continuity of her researches about memory and landscape, Morgane Denzler appropriates the two visions where the holistic approach opposes that of the point of view, thus putting two philosophies in tension. The result is a new series of works where the landscape is folded, unfolded, opened in space, It so crosses the boundaries of cartography and photos of Alpine landscapes. Mountain ranges, unbridgeable rocks, vast greenery, depth of lakes become entangled with the grids, with the marks, with the standardized colors and with the folding of the map. The artist invites us to forget the sole point of view in benefit of a deconcentration of the sight. Our gaze has to « wonder so that the landscape appears. " It is then a question of letting the landscape come in us with what it reveals and what it hide; its foldings and its sequences of movements. Morgane Denzler deconstructs a false relationship with nature, the standardizing concepts are diverted to make a poem and an experience (visual and sensorial) of the landscape. All it takes is to be absorbed by the landscape the correlations of which are permanent and infinite. If the Westerners set up a strategy of reduction of the landscape in their scale, the artist reminds the infinite, the depth and the density. In her work the landscape is not only the meeting place between Man and its environment, it is above all the place of " the operation of the world ".
* All the quotations are extracted from the same book.
