Text accompanying the exhibition
and list of works
The Alexander McQueen Sarabande Foundation is pleased to present Us at the end of the world, Arthur Poujois’s solo exhibition at 792 High Rd, London. The show is centred around a series of photographic works, drawings and sculptures that invite the viewer to the artist’s world, a world built from ruins where magic rules logic.
Referencing Anna Tsing’s book “The mushroom at the end of the world”, which entails the story of the matsutake, a mushroom which grows in our capitalist ruins, where forests fail, at the end of the world; Poujois draws a geography of energy, questioning the very meaning of mankind’s modern dream and survival.
The artist imagines a puzzled reality, taking his own broken fragmented identity as a starting point to propose a new semiotic, using fiction and spirituality as a means of productivity. Poujois takes inspiration from the natural world as well as the survival tactics he adopted facing his neurodivergence: mimicking, copying, conforming, learning, adapting, and self-erasing to create multiple layered assemblages that reflect an imagined world driven by emergence.
Poujois’s initiative complements the words of poet Arthur Rimbaud “While public funds are poured out in fraternal feasts, a bell of rose-coloured fire tolls in the clouds”. The artist responds with care in his poetic universe: subtle touch and marks, disjointed matter that shapes sensical organisms - objects - futuristic totem- taking trash as treasures, blurring the hierarchy of form, erasing form, instead of thinking in terms of stabilised form and matter, studying dynamic systems and modulatory processes. Aiming to develop a stronger and more intimate bond with the non-human by drawing upon the magical energy found beyond trauma, fear and aloneness in a patriarchal world, Poujois invites the viewer to experience acceptance as a drive to go further in the world.
In his own words: “If we can say that subjectivity is the means to access the infinite and that art creates subjectivity, the entanglement of matter and meaning and a way of making art inclusive of the Natural are what constitute the future of contemporary art and life. This way, I believe a new set of subjects, words, phrases and gestures will emerge towards a better understanding of the universe and mankind.”
We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath; and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind; the distinction between culture and civilization is an artificial one, providing two words to signify an identical function. If our life lacks brimstone, Le., constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force. And this faculty is an exclusively human one. I would even say that it is this infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine; for far from believing that man invented the supernatural and the divine, I think it is man's age-old intervention which has ultimately corrupted the divine within him.
Antonin Artaud
List of works
EAST area
1 - Self-encryption (1) Silkscreen on paper, cyanotype on soundproofing panel, steel, shoebox lid
2 - Self-encryption (2) Silkscreen on paper, cyanotype on soundproofing panel, steel, shoebox lid
3 -How do you make me feel you’re touching me? Aluminium, rubber, polyethene, eggshell, preserved thistle from Charleville, wood paint
4 - Stone doll Limestone, basalt, waxed leather, bone, wood, crocheted polyethene, mirror paper, silk, wood paint
5 - Open source (1) Concrete, varnish, jesmonite
6 - Culture-in-action, ’s second breath Giclée on Japanese washi paper, wood, glass, metal, silk, severed page from Metamagical themas, Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (Ch; Pattern, poetry and power in the Music of Frédéric Chopin) by Pr. Hofstadter
7 - 8 Diptych “The zone”, installed in ‘the grass pamphlet’.
7 - First box of a diptych “The zone”; installed in the ‘grass pamphlet’, on how we tie trees: you want to make a reality, taking all the time it needs, find in the duration, the time spent looking; that you prove you make-believe. Wood, dead branch from rose bush, copper, paper, velvet, polyethene, silk, TV screen, glass, preserved thistles from Charleville, Egyptian note
8 - Second box of a diptych “The zone”; installed in the ‘grass pamphlet”: inclusive thoughts that get old too old that need to get out, stems from sweet sweat, alarm call, the vision, the call to extinction, how we tie trees, multi-purpose everything, better remain than leave, leave from inside, quit everything, how to-. Wood, stained glass, copper, paper, velvet, polyethene, silk, TV screen, glass, wax, bone, pencil, silk sleeve with button
9 - Transformation drawing; (electric field) Ink and collage on paper, custom frame
10 - Untitled Glass, solder, metal paint
11- E8 rotating sun Glass, solder, metal pain
12 - Untitled Glass, solder, lead came, cotton, metal paint
WEST area
13 - Symphony Giclée on Japanese washi paper
14 - Emergence Giclée on Japanese washi paper
15 - Artificial distinction Root system, stone, glass, copper, polyethene paper, electric circuit, wood & metal paint, on steel on an acrylic perspex box
16 - Open source (2) Concrete, varnish, and wax, under an acrylic perspex box
17 - Happy to be alone Mirrors
18 - 3.14159265359 Tree root, synthetic fibres
19 - Open source (3) Concrete, varnish, rubber
20 - Nature encryption and role play Metal, wood, rubber, polymer
21 - (Target)Time capsule for the archaic Invisible; the convalescence of a seed, a shelter for the soul; Just as bullets leave marks, fissuring, a fortunate twist for necessary renaissance (Source) Wood, steel, silk, oil paint, mirror film, tape, tree trunk
22 - Model for a land (under ‘The cracked sky of puzzles’) Glass, on copper on waxed Nepalese lokta paper
23 - Please, hear me Japanese tree lilac branches, Betula Medwediewii trunk, found wood, felt pen, varnish, wood paint, inkjet on paper, wing mirror, staples, natural fibres
24-25 - All my heroes standing, lying, dying Steel, nickel, chrome, paint.