Hervé Garcia - Menschenfresser

March 17 - April 08 2006

The work of Hervé Garcia can be characterised as a flux of reflection, formal experiments, and historical references appropriated in a broad range of medias, such as collage, sound, photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and other three dimensional objects.

Whereas Garcia's latest solo exhibitions included a wide range of medias and were staged as a sort of spectacle or cabaret, the main feature of his exhibition at Croy Nielsen is a series of large-scale sculptures. Literally, the sculptures are taken to their limits in terms of stability and gravity. The range of colours (mainly red, blue, and yellow combined with grey, black and white) echoes the clarity of Fernand Léger's modernist hope, but both geometry and colours are regularly broken by distortion and splashes of paint. In spite of their overwhelming size, every sense of monumentality is negated by their overall bricolage-character.
They carry traces of Garcia's interest in folk culture, the archaic, and the primitive, and are related to another body of work entitled "New Folklore": an enterprise that consists of transforming and distorting figurative sculptures in public space by adding abstract "extensions". This undertaking has already taken shape in several "sketches" made as collages.

There is a hyper-textual dimension to Garcia's work, but there are no obvious keys or codes that have to be broken. His appropriations are situated somewhere beyond certainty and routine systematization.