Ecotone — romaincarre

Ecotone

2024

Exhibition
Cur. Alexandre Pastor

Galerie du Crous, Paris

In the natural sciences, an ecotone refers to an interface, a zone of transition between two different biodiversities.

In light of Romain Carré’s work, the exhibition “Écotone” invites viewers to discover the artist’s output, in which two things face one another: on the one hand, the Western notion and representation of Nature and the environment, and on the other, the artist’s plastic research into the notion of objectivity.

Transforming philosophical epistemology into artistic practice, Romain Carré’s works are never given directly as they are. The artist opens up a breach of ambiguity, an “uncanny valley”*, in which the origin of the materials unsettles our bearings and our appreciation of his productions. Hybrid Trophy emerges in the space as a form that is at once half-animal, half-plant. Through his series Cosmogonies, Romain Carré superimposes forms drawn from ancient cultures or contemporary representations, each depicting a “world” in its own right.

Playing with scales of representation (micro, macro, symbolic, physical, spiritual and so on), the artist captures his productions within perceptions where the profane and the sacred, East and West, the immediate and the distant collide. His works operate as veritable devices that challenge and unsettle the viewer, who becomes a “lost Wanderer” in a nature that is no longer familiar, but which they learn to know anew through new forms such as Meditating Sterility.

The artist’s landscapes appear as the horizon in which he once again shakes our perception. Here there are no fantasies of an idealised or mystified natural landscape. Romain Carré extracts the “very marrow” of the landscape, leaving us only with its idea, its structure, its skeleton. The painter’s gesture blends into the pictorial surface of the AI-generated work, which does not allow us a precise appreciation of it.

In this thin interface where objectivity is an ecotone, it is never fixed; it is constantly shifting, hybrid and, paradoxically, plural. It questions what we are in the present and is, to borrow Foucault’s metaphor, “a glove turned inside out”.

Alexandre Pastor