Praz-Delavallade Paris is pleased to present Pauline Bazignan's new solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from 20 April to 8 June.
The time has come. For whom? For what? And to move in which direction? These are the questions that arise when visiting Momentum, a new exhibition by Pauline Bazignan in which the Italian Renaissance and the invention of perspective gives us the keys to understanding the Anthropocene. This term, used to describe the period we are living in, points to how the actions of humankind are responsible for the destruction of the planet. The last syllable of Anthropocene resembles the French and Italian titles of The Last Supper1, which was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan between 1495 and 1498. And yet the meaning of the two words couldn’t be more different. “Cene” denotes a recent geological period, whereas “La Cène”, the painting’s French title, comes from cenare, which is Latin for to dine. However, in the ample tapestry, the fourteen new paintings and six sculptures produced by Bazignan, these two separate meanings come together in a key idea of which she was not aware at the time. As such, her act of painting is akin to a vision. And as Marcel Duchamp once said: “I believe very strongly in the ‘medium’ aspect of the artist”.