For the ninth edition of Bizarro in Saint Germain, "A Child's Soul", the Géraldine Banier Gallery, brings together four contemporary artists, Claudia Ebbing (Germany), Frédéric Garnier (France), Dorothéa Klug (Germany), and Carlos Tardez (Spain) who reformulate the question of childhood innocence, its dreams, its imagination and its fears in the current context.
Following in the footsteps of Tom Thumb, the exhibition invites us to shift our point of view, and to question, whether we are children or grown-ups, what is preserved of innocence, of the capacity for wonder and imagination.
At the beginning of the exhibition, Claudia Ebbing's large format paintings plunge us into a poetic and marvelous universe, they form a collection where ancestral images, inherited from the artist's culture, and current issues subtly respond to each other and create a world full of tenderness. The melancholy of the artist gives way to the dreams of the child. A child immersed in nature, they are connected and form a saving whole.
A few stones away, the actors of Dorothea Klug's theater are waiting. Trained as a ceramist, the artist uses this medium in a creative process where the starting point is the drawing to express a palette of emotional states.
Dorothea's fantastic characters borrow pastel colors and childhood shapes, half-children, half-animals, each huddled against himself, trying to reconcile his inner life of dreams, fears and feelings in a body still under construction.
It is the look and the interrogations of a father artist that we discover on the canvases, painted with oil, of Carlos Tardez. A tender look of course, amazed by the creativity and ingenuity of his children. However, the mimetic, clumsy and playful attitudes question. The parodies of child-kings, appropriating the adult world to become adults, question the parental and societal responsibility towards this tender age, which is built from its environment.
Like a book whose pages have been turned, Frédéric Garnier's works seem to be in line with Carlos Tardez's reflection. The children have grown up, they are teenagers.
Socially committed artist, his paintings on canvas use the codes of urban art: concrete, acrylic and aerosol and thus anchor his work in the City. The symbol of the lifebuoy that regularly recurs in this series, questions the capacity of our evolved society to accompany the youngest towards an uncertain future, while in parallel the animal paintings show a primitive nature that instinctively preserves its offspring.