Flores et décors

The invasives

By manipulating, assembling and juxtaposing colored plastic bags, Paul Pouvreau creates his own kind of nature. An artificial nature created with a certain delicacy in the use of a material that reveals a diversity of floral species brought together in bouquets, each more seductive than the last. The deployment of these bags, which he combines with a variety of folds and creases where emptiness, transparency, superimposition and juxtaposition of layers produce gradations and color associations, generates a universe that is both familiar and strange at the same time. Her compositions, harmonious in their forms and materials, simulacra of corollas and leaves, are nonetheless bouquets offered to the viewer, subject to the rapture and seductive power they engage. Although the intention is not to copy particular natural species, since plastic produces forms and varieties that are inherent to it, the artist nevertheless participates in a sublimation of the object in the handling and discovery of the material's possibilities. The development of this research reveals the conjunction of opposites.

The art of cultivating not plants, but seductive and invasive plastic species, is symptomatic of a society faced with paradoxical and contradictory messages, based on the one hand on the systematic stimulation of a desire to consume in ever greater proportions, driven by marketing and advertising, and on the other on the need to play an active part in protecting the environment, notably by limiting waste. The representation of plant life shows both a closeness to nature and a distancing from it through the use of plastic bags, which are harmful to flora and fauna, and which spread across the planet, altering ecosystems and endangering animals by suffocating and strangling them. As objects recycled by an artistic act and fixed by the photographic medium, Les invasives take their place as a place of passage and exchange between matter and thought. Their presence opens the way to a new existence to be conquered in the disenchantment of a world whose sad outcome they signal majestically and in color.

Excerpt from a text by Isabelle Tessier, Director of the Vitré artothèque