“A plant that settles where it shouldn't is a mere opportunist, but a plant that thrives where it shouldn't is a weed. We don't blame it for its boldness - all seeds are bold - but for its tremendous success. Men work to create a world in which only weeds can strive, and yet we are outraged to find them everywhere.” Hope Jahren, Lab girl, a story of science, trees and love, 2016

[…]

In 1887, Baudelaire said of the glorification and cult of images that it was his "great, unique, primitive passion"1. He was essentially referring to the painting of Delacroix, which animated him immensely in the idea that it reproduced the “intimate thought of the artist who dominates the model, as the creator dominates creation”. Nearly a hundred and thirty years later, the year 2015 marks a real turning point in the history of images: every day, three billion images have started being shared online. By way of comparison, the art philosopher Emmanuel Allo pointed out that until then, and since prehistoric times, the whole of images produced had numbered in the tens of thousands. “Today, ten thousand images is nothing. Thirty-five thousand years are swept away by a few clicks and a few algorithms”2. This is a far cry from the infatuation of Baudelaire and his contemporaries who were just discovering photography and its feel of reality. Faced with this spectacular democratization of the production of images - we can all produce them quantitatively, without any qualitative appreciation - and their imposed and incessant circulation, the artistic image reassures in that it appears as a means of action and reaction.

Les mauvaises herbes résisteront presents the work of four artists who maintain a particular relationship, intimate or detached, to the image. Laura Rives, Elsa Leydier, Delphine Wibaux and Anne-Laure Franchette, immerse themselves in this proliferation of images in order to exploit its possibilities but also its limits. They see it as a way to express their vision of the world, but also to question their place and their condition as artists. They make the images active accomplices, they modify them, have fun with them, worry about them, and do not hesitate to abuse their status as an image.

If the image no longer merges with reality, it is itself a reality. It has its own history, its own interests, its limits and its virtues: characteristics that artists seize upon to question scrupulously its relationship to reality. Thus, through different processes of deformation of the real by the image and of the image by the real, the four artists are creators of a new reality. Through a mastered orchestration of their plastic interventions, they impose their reality on that of the image, inevitably bringing into play the question of the materiality, and granting over to the real the role of main protagonist. Whether it is matter, element, space or time, whether it is palpable or imperceptible, the real is here closely linked to nature. It is nature that interferes in these different approaches of visual metamorphosis. It is its power and its fragility that guide the artists in their material and, far beyond that, political and social questioning.

[...] Laura Rives works on photography. Not as a photographer, but as a visual artist who questions the material, the support, and the digital dimension. Giving paramount importance to the process, she takes as a basis her own photographs that she manipulates by experimenting with multiple digital, chemical and physical gestures. In an almost performative approach, the photographic image is altered, tortured, and made vulnerable. The representation disappears in favor of abstract images that impose themselves in space. Laura Rives questions the notion of medium and materiality in a digital world where immateriality prevails. By brutalizing the image to offer it new value and reality, she creates a parallel with the catastrophe of digital images which, far from remaining vaporous in the clouds, travel via marine cables and exist through a medium: that of the Datacenters. Permanently heating, these servers, installed in isolated and increasingly northern locations, have a devastating environmental impact. The energy cost required by this question of the materiality of the images has become a huge problem, both ecological and economical. Artists seem to us to be the only ones able to make visible “this invisible economy that underlies the contemporary architecture of images”, which refers to the concept of “iconomy”, theorized by Peter Szendy3. It is by confronting these new notions of invisibilization and hypervisibility and in opposition to this destructive materialization of the virtual that Laura Rives gives to her destructive gesture a positive, constructive dimension, an act of resistance in which chance also finds its place. Like a flow, the image is moving, erases itself, and questions its own obsolescence. The metamorphosis is very real and tends to put back in place our vision of a world deformed by the supremacy of the digital.

For the exhibition, Laura Rives takes her study of resistance even further by experimenting with a synthetic material, Plexiglas, on which she directly prints photographs representing a varied and colorful mixture of cleaning substances, such as shower gels. The artist then works on the material through cutting, thermal deformation and superimposition, and tests the resilience of Plexiglas: that is to say its elasticity, its ability to absorb energy during its transformation, and therefore to resist. Taken out of their context and associated with plastic, products designed to wash, soften and beautify the skin - essentially feminine - are therefore devoid of any benefits. It is all their aggressiveness and polluting power that explode at the sight of their brightness of color. In this process of image fragmentation, it is also the notion of ecological resilience that is invoked. Nature's power of adaptation, of survival in the face of the consequences of human activity. One may perceive moreover something organic, geological or even animal in the forms created by the artist. The choice to use Plexiglas is not insignificant. It reflects, in a period of crisis, the human fear and need to adorn and protect oneself from another, but also from a nature which, to a certain extent, would be taking back its rights. Although its polluting and harmful properties are no longer to be demonstrated, plastic has returned to the forefront in no time, acting as a tool for planetary control and domination.

In light of the Anthropocene, the depletion of natural resources and the fragility of nature caused by over-consumption - both material and virtual - have led nature into an action of resilience with no possible return. Faced with this power, humanity persists and resists, and its imprint, mobilized and denounced, determines the current stakes of contemporary creation.  [...] Laura Rives acts on matter just as our western societies act on nature.

[...] Finally, if the human species is named Men, it is clearly as Women that our four artists resist. The status of female artists is not the claim of the exhibition: art is not supposed to have a gender. Yet it would be tempting to make the creative power of their interventions resonate with the efforts that these resistants must carry in order to impose themselves in a contemporary art world that is still predominantly directed by men. To give up the status of “beautiful plant” that is attributed to them from the outset, to opt for that of “weed” to fight to exist, to persist or to start over.

Alice Santiago, curator

1 Charles Baudelaire, Mon corps mis à nus. Journaux Intimes, 1887

2 Emmanuel Alloa dans La démocratisation de la production des images, broadcast l’Art et la matière sur France Culture, February 2020

3 Peter Szendy, Le Supermarché du visible. Essai d’iconomie, Les Éditions de minuit, 2017