Carnet pour l’exil # ... The exile needs, of course, to compulsively walk around the chosen city.
But they also need ideals. Especially here, in Paris.
Jumping Jesus! Ideals!
A body may believe that, in old, disabused Paris, atavistic Revolutionary zeal or bootless experiments with Fourrierism or Blanquism or too many hours studying Babeuf has muddied the country’s ideals. Indeed, the exile may have noticed parents and officials alike exhorting, even seen placards urging, children and other citizens alike to resister. Often in the image of the Résistants of the last world war.
The exile, still muddled, in spite of Death of a Salesman, by the American cultural belief that winning is everything and aware that Résistants were mostly losers by their resistance, may imagine that parents and officials in this country are encouraging children, and citizens, too, to become drone-savvy partisans of socio-political Luddism. Or worse.
But, no. Résistance means “Respect your own ideals”, not “Resistance”, no accent.
So, though an exile might not know it just to look at her, visual artist Sarah Valente is in her way, a “résistant”. But when I walked into the Galérie Romero Paprocki on the rue Saint Claude in the Marais a couple of weeks before Christmas last year, I wanted to have a look at how her exhibition, called Amore Infinito, was dealing with a shared ideal.
She has created a story with esthetic accessories – swords, statuary, offerings, keepsakes – about people as part of a biological chain of being. We share that ideal: to really understand a human person as an integral part of other big wiggly wormy furry photosynthetic tiny slimy Life, capital “l”.
Observing that it is impossible to describe and take in the whole of Life as described – she means all that archaebacteria, eubacteria, protista, fungi, plants, animals and all the dips and curves and controversies and rumbles therein and by – Sarah Valente says people have wound up forgetting altogether that they are part of the chain of Life. People’s inaction is not just puzzling, she says, it seems unnatural. “If somebody has a baby, they take one look at it and want to protect it with their own life. So why do they look at Earth Life and have the urge to tear it up?”
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Galérie Romero Paprocki, 8 rue Saint Claude, specializes in contemporary art. Expect a pleasant visit. As a visual artist, Sarah Valente concerns herself with “the hidden sides of the world, the little-known aspects of nature”. Her projects include Jungle Canopy Mapping, The Birds, the Microcosm and The Hive. Galérie Romero Paprocki represents, in addition to Sarah Valente, other such woman artists as Pauline Guerrier, Paola Siri Renard, Deborah Bowmann and Marion Flament. The gallery’s current exhibition, Le cose che non sappiamo (“Things we don’t know”), is a group show. Follow up your visit by a brisk walk that will justify the last real Tarte Tatin in town in a café not far off the rue Saint Claude.
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