“The gleaming surfaces of Tristan Chevillard’s work recall the craft of lacquer. The paintings to which he applies varnish, as well as his resin pieces, possess a sheen that evokes both large Asian decorative panels and screens. Working in formats ranging from the scale of a door to that of a small mirror, he plays with scale to deceive the eye, allowing an ecosystem to emerge through a tree, a flower, or a butterfly rather than a landscape. On the surface of the works, drawings—made from natural history plates and collaged onto the canvas—create a reading through aggregation and stratification. Thus, plants and animals coexist with acrylic paints and polymer resins, echoing plastiglomerate, the sign of a new geological age in which the human hand is embedded even within rock. Entitled Icons of the Kali Yuga, his assemblages of dried flowers and leaves, objects and images embedded in resin, refer to the Iron Age period in Hindu cosmogony. The artist approaches this moment of transition in an elegiac manner, ready to celebrate a disappearance for which he sees little alternative. As if humanity itself were incapable of breaking free from this casing—reminiscent of the amber trapping Jurassic mosquitoes—as if, through our very dependence on fossil fuels, we were doomed to perpetuate a cycle.”
Henri Guette
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