Inhabited space transcends geometrical space. (...) When the image is new, the world is new". Gaston Bachelard, The Poetic of Space. La poétique de l'espace. Presses universitaires de France. Paris, 1989.
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real" says Morpheus to Neo in the 1999 film The Matrix. The hero wakes up from his computer-generated virtual reality, experiences the Real as a desolate war-torn, yet spectacular landscape. For philosopher Slavoj Zizek, this sentence exemplifies the hyper-reality we now live in, a world where the Virtual and the Real, the Natural and the Artificial, are so mixed up that it becomes impossible to separate one from the other. Hence the archetypes of landscape art has dramatically changed since the time of the great masters. Instead of a sublime, bucolique Nature, we are now confronted by the experience of a post-industrial, dystopian environment.
"Future landscapes" is an attempt to explore some of these changes. The artists exhibited here reinvent the tradition of landscape art. Coming from various part of the world, their visions compare, complete or oppose one another. Envisioning the future, their works draw the landscapes of tomorrow. A new territory, inhabited by strange creatures, mutants like the totems exhibited by Theo Mercier.
Yann Perreau, curator