Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery

After founding and directing the design agency V.I.T.R.I.O.L. for 20 years, Jean-Marc Dimanche, along with Florence Guillier-Bernard, established Maison Parisienne in 2008, a gallery dedicated to French crafts. In early 2016, he was called upon as an advisor to Princess Stéphanie of Luxembourg, where he worked on creating the biennial “De Mains De Maîtres” of which he is now the general curator. From 2019 to 2022, he directed ELEVEN STEENS, a private art center in Brussels. In 2023, he co-curated “Grandeur Nature,” the first contemporary sculpture exhibition in the English garden of the Château de Fontainebleau, before founding “ceramic brussels” with Gilles Parmentier, an international contemporary art fair dedicated to ceramics.

Moving the Moon…

“Things, things, things that speak volumes when they say something else.”

Henri Michaux

Under this title created by Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil, I sought reason and prayer, to celebrate the nocturnal celestial body, its surrounding forces and its mysterious movements. Wanderers, migrants, creatures of the night … they are all in search for survival. “Exodeurs,” I would call them, as I stop at the large bas-relief that our duo of artists has frozen, not in stone but in resin, echoing the human figures that have been advancing themselves for centuries, as they appear on the tympanum of the abbey of Vézelay and on many other facades still adorning historical cathedrals in France. Perhaps what can be observed when encoutering this object, is it being an homage to the philosophical wanderings and intellectual illuminations of Rimbaud, a poet dear to our hearts. 

In any case, there is no biblical resurgence present in the work. Not even literary allusions. The form, or rather, the forms of the work serve to create an enlightening discourse on our current climate crisis. A real crisis of conscience, which is already pushing many communities and animal species to migrate from their lands in search of a better life elsewhere. It is a procession of sorts, similar to the one Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil had already implemented during the summer of 2023 in Châteauvert. The artists have decided to display it, captured by video, in a unique and singular animation of an exhibition where action appears deliberately halted. A journey that inscribes itself in the place and obliges us to move and question ourselves on this path of faith, with each work entering into a dialogue with the viewer, and the viewers amongst themselves. There is a need for us to encounter such artworks and a need for us to not lose hope. All of a sudden, our world seems to have slowed down, machines have stopped. Perhaps given that the subject is particularly sensitive to the two artists, due to the uncertain future of our post-pandemic world, we are confronted with a prelude to an apocalypse from afar, which is announced, denounced and amplified day after day … Or perhaps, more simply put, their gaze is focused on what is to come in the future, as they create an archeology of a future ever more idealized, a word taking place after the world of today, constituting the world of tomorrow.

They seem to tell us that we are in serious times, though relaying the message with a lighthearted tone and usual nonchalance. It is easy to observe that their latest works carry, in an unusual way, the weight of humanity. Silhouettes emerge, appear, disappear, enveloped, as if half hidden, in a sea of clouds. Great changes are coming, like birds in the sky, omens of what is to come. The incarnation manifests itself in these sculptures which quite literally inhabit the space, they take on imaginary and uncertain shapes, whose morphology remains a mystery to us. Signs of life, masks or effigies, shelters or nests, the world of today, according to Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil, seems to have split in two. The beings or species are probably not so far gone. The notion of time is fluid, and, as always in their work, escapes us while re-activating itself in the timelessness of shapes and forms created  by the artists. Are these fragments of the past, or futuristic places of shelter stemming from imagination, playing with our sense of reality? Certainly, our earth is damaged, but at this moment of time the duo does not seek to repair, they seek to reinvent it through a plethora of objects and sculptures whose use seems foreign to us at first glance, but who can gain a new sense of function and utility if only we dream up and attribute it to them. To each our own miniature planet, but for all of us it is the same planet. Unique and fragile, universal as it is beautiful and mortal.

Moving the moon... is hard to grasp. But its imagery reveals the changes and upheavals that are obstructing our earth and perhaps our sky.  Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameii take us on an ornamental and metonymic journey. 

A stroll through the exhbition will famliarise the visitors with a series of works especially conceived here for the artists’ first show in Paris. Behind their quest for sensibility lies a profound questioning of the place of our species, a question which ought to be tackled at the utmost urgency! (Jean-Marc Dimanche)