Mendes Wood DM

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to announce “La Pensée Férale,” the first exhibition of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané at our Parisian gallery. Designed as a two-part presentation, two exhibitions by the artist will be held simultaneously in Paris, at Mendes Wood DM and at the Esther Schipper gallery. Serving as the cornerstone connecting these two exhibitions, a series of works transpose the eye of a dog onto a tree trunk, whether through landscape interventions or sculptural creations made from bark. They highlight a mutually transformative interplay of perspectives between the viewer and the viewed. “La Pensée Férale” continues Steegmann Mangrané’s exploration of the complex relationships between beings and their environment in places like the Mata Atlântica. For the artist, the conditions in these tropical forest environments reveal a wholly different mode of existence, a way of being in the world manifested in the various cosmologies of indigenous peoples, generating other notions of perspective, subjectivity, and agency. This two-part presentation offers a glimpse into Steegmann Mangrané’s recent work, which finds poetic expressions and striking representations of this vibrant and embodied nature through delicate organic materials such as leaves, branches, or fruits, as well as photography and film. A comprehensive retrospective of his work, “Daniel Steegmann Mangrané: A Leaf Shapes the Eye,” is currently on display at MACBA in Barcelona until May 20, 2024.

At Mendes Wood DM, eyes embedded in large sections of oak bark gaze at visitors from various heights as they ascend the stairs. These sections belong to a three-hundred-year-old oak recently killed by the severe drought affecting Catalonia. Climate change has altered precipitation and temperature averages, allowing invasive species to proliferate and promoting infestations such as that of the xylophagous beetle, endangering forests and stressing fauna and flora. The disembodied eyes of these dogs recurring in these sculptural works once again emphasize the idea of a natural world that feels, perceives, and constantly dialogues with its inhabitants. A series of holographic works, evoking a small terrarium or the display cases of a natural history museum, creates a small living tableau composed of branches, geometric shapes, and, in some cases, insects and human presence. As one looks closely “inside” the represented space and tries to decipher what is seen, one realizes the arbitrary dimension of the distinction between organic and man-made forms. The interlacing of the living gives rise to a new series of sculptures, “Tangled Leaves,” presented in the next room. Playing on words, particularly on the phonetic proximity between “leaves” and “lives,” the sculptures evoke the interconnectedness of all beings, metaphorically represented in the exhibition by the image of the leaf. Installed in the final room but spreading its soundtrack throughout the exhibition, a new video work shows a surreal erotic image: an eye, seen underwater, surrounded by tadpoles. The combination of stillness and animation, of an eye invaded/surrounded by small beings, eloquently evokes fundamental fears as well as the profound effects of climate change. The soundtrack, composed by the renowned cellist Franziska Agnier, accentuates the strangeness of the imagery with a suspenseful staccato.

At Esther Schipper, a series of seven photographs punctuate the exhibition space. They were taken in the Tijuca National Park, an Atlantic rainforest in Rio de Janeiro. Once almost entirely deforested, the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II nationalized the lands in the mid-19th century and had the forest replanted by a group of slaves, in what was probably one of the world’s first governmental ecological actions. Although almost entirely cleared, Tijuca still houses trees over 600 years old. These giants were already in place when the Portuguese first arrived and witnessed, in its entirety, the violent process of colonization. In Steegmann Mangrané’s works, the trees, in turn, look at us through the disembodied eyes of wild dogs. The photographs are accompanied by short texts written by the philosopher Juliana Fausto, who explores the history of this place from the perspective of feral dogs that inhabit the forest today, and who wonders what “feral thought” might look like. Drawing inspiration, while departing from it in significant aspects, from the notion of “wild thought” of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, which postulates the possibility of a primordial thought not domesticated by (Western) civilization, Fausto imagines what our domesticated thought could become if we were to break the chains of domestication, decolonize, and free our thinking. It will not be wild thought, as described by Lévi-Strauss, but it could become feral thought, Fausto tells us. Accompanying this photographic series, delicate branches are suspended from the ceiling or presented on pedestals. The various sculptures are made of split twigs or branches split in two, sometimes intertwined, as if in a mirror. These graceful sculptures possess an embodied, perhaps even anthropomorphic quality, suggesting both fragility and resilience.

Solo Show of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

From April 1st to May 26th, 2024