Verriales 2007
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The universe in which we live is strewn with an infinity of Contrasts, contrasts that constitute the scales of reference for our senses and our judgement, allowing us to recognise our situation in relation to space and time.
A contrast is made up of two elements marking the two extremities of a line, a sort of scale of appreciation on which we are constantly positioning ourselves without even thinking.
Concerning space the infinitely small exists in relation to the infinitely big.
As to time we are positioned in the present, between two infinities, the past and the future.
These scales of contrast are sometimes punctuated by special moments: between the extremes of life and death, we easily recognise infancy, adolescence, maturity and old-age.
Contrasts are therefore legion and every artist inevitably finds himself incessantly confronted with contrasts imposing themselves on him. His creative expression emerges in that way; from the manner with which he either copes with treating those extremes and via their opposition ignite his own creative spark, or how he unites them in startling “tours de force” that even finish up sometimes in generic names such as the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt.
When artists work in glass they are using a raw material that abounds in contrasts: transparency versus opacity, shade versus light, solid versus liquid, hot versus cold, colour versus monochrome. Contrast is a motor of creativity: the artist puts himself into his work in confronting contrast – a force that at the same time guides and harasses him.
In the 2007 VERRIALES this new theme Contrast has been explored by some thirty international artists. With all their individual preoccupations, tastes, desires and questionings, they demonstrate to us how each depicts contrasts of ultra-personal dimensions, using the opposition of subjects, the opposition of shapes, the opposition of colours and the opposition of mineral materials. Via impossible marriages, sublime unions, and unexpected connections, the artists reveal themselves to the spectator. Stirring up feelings buried in their hearts and souls, their hands master the opposite poles of concepts like beauty and ugliness, love and hate, success and failure, slavery and freedom, vice and virtue, pride and humbleness, egoism and altruism, avarice and generosity, summits and abysses, feelings and reason, good and evil.
This new exhibition invites you to an exciting, emotion-charged discovery of the artistic depiction of a whole gamut of the Contrasts that govern the lives of mankind.
Serge Lechaczynski et Jean Eskenazi
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