" Man is a wolf for man ", mocked the Roman playwriter Plaute. The famous sentence summarizes the human being ambivalence, between instinct and reason, highlighted by Frédéric Garnier in his work.
The homo sapiens hides his defects behind a civilization which he wants decent, honest and respectable. The artist questions here this repression and suggests inherent destruction and chaos in symmetrical appearances, rational and controlled manufactured motives. Industrial dissimulation …
Titles chosen by the artist are gladly derisive, even cynic: « soft Villa » parodies the frontage of a house through some rusty metal sheets decorated with two tiny cactus put on a minimalist shelf. « Eden Garden » evokes the snake of the original sin without the tree nor the apple, with a glittering garden hose. « The man is a reasonable animal » plays with the semantic game of Aristote’s translation, inlaid on the tray of a butcher chopping block: "reasonable" meaning "capable of reasoning", but also of the worst...
So, here is the Man, this is Humanity: « Ecce Homo ». Quoted from Saint John Gospel, when Pontius Pilate presents Jesus, after his whipping, to the people of Jerusalem, the expression became the title of numerous paintings of the messiah wearing his thorns crown. Frédéric Garnier recreates this crown assembling butcher's hooks in stainless steel, as a sacrificial relic.
The artist twists the symbols and laughs of the human myths in the heart of his studio in Troyes. What if our scientific will to adjust nature, to include it in countable and temporal systems was absurd and derisory? What if progress was, as asserted by Jean Cocteau, the development of an error? The religion another advance toward the death?
« As our breaths, the poetry is vain here… »
Axel Sourisseau