Mercredi 04 Mai 2016 11:06:04 par Nour Alahiane-lechevalier dans Expositions

French acclaimed contemporary photographer and visual artist Gérard Rancinan teamed with author Caroline Gaudriault to produce a series of large format photographs conceived as post-apocalyptic "tableaux vivants".

"Modern Man can be seen as a post-apocalyptic angel, at once Messenger and Punk Demiurge." For Rancinan and Gaudriault, Berlin and Urban Spree represent a perfect communion where his monumental photographs become incarnated, where context and situation add a new dimension to his corpus of works, where decadence and redemption linger in unexpected corners.

The Feast of crumbs © Gérard Rancinan

After being exhibited in the Accademia delle Arti e del Disegno di Firenze in March 2016 in close vicinity with the Renaissance painters, "The Destiny of Men" at Urban Spree will highlight and reveal a much darker and contemporary vision of the series. Berlin, city of chaos and ruins, city of feast and decadence, is a perfect contextual location for the post-punk dark angels of Rancinan. Rancinan will also specially produce for the show a monumental 8 x 11 m photograph, affixed outdoor on the Urban Spree "Artist Wall" facing Warschauer Strasse.

Gérard Rancinan and Caroline Gaudriault have since many years compared their views on the times in which they live. After working together on several different projects, they deliver their new vision of society and its contemporaries with The Destiny of Men. No one can escape their nature, but everyone can surpass it. How can we challenge human destiny? It is this question that humanity has, over the course of its evolution, tirelessly attempted to answer.

© Gérard Rancinan

If we had to represent the immaterial part of Man – his thought, his desire for elevation and selftranscendence, his very curiosity, that intangible essence handed down from one person to another, from a parent to her child, or from a teacher to his pupil – we would, perhaps, look to an ancient iconographical tradition from the Byzantine era, the symbology of the angel. This anthropomorphic representation, which dates back to the mosaics of Saint Sophia in Constantinople, to the "heaven bound" angels of Giotto and to those of Michelangelo freed from a block of marble, has always exerted a great fascination on artists.

With Rancinan, it is always a question of symbolic Man and his fantasies, of his transcendence and transgressions. There is never any angelic moralizing. Man is no choirboy; he has written his history through the force of his ambition and curiosity. He has invented botany, built libraries, seen the Earth from afar, landed a spacecraft on a comet 510 million kilometers from home. All of this is true, even if people still ask the eternal question – how should we raise a child?

Fourteen monumental photographs by Gérard Rancinan and a calligraphic installation by Caroline Gaudriault propose a modern interpretation of the symbology of the angel. A post-apocalyptic angel who combines several different principles: good and evil, ethics and progress, the spiritual and the intellectual. An angel who questions, now more than ever, the meaning that should be given to human history.