Exhibition by Geoffrey Badel
TEMPESTAIRE
January 25 to April 2, 2021
After graduating from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier in 2017, Geoffrey Badel pursues his artistic practice through drawing, video, installation, art-action and their promiscuity under a posture of ghost seeker. He lives and works in Montpellier, where he has been a member of the Collectif In Extremis since 2015 and the Futur Immoral dance company since 2017, in which he experiments with collective work and the sharing of practices and knowledge. Geoffrey Badel took part in the post-graduate program "Saison 6", created in 2018 by Montpellier Contemporain, structured around three residencies: Cochin (India) in December 2018, Venice (Italy) in May 2019 and Istanbul (Turkey) in August-September 2019. He is currently deepening his drawing practice through the design of natural inks and handmade paper, and intervenes in various educational and social contexts to pass on his practice and offer artistic workshops.
Geoffrey Badel's exhibition Tempestaire is the result of a month-long residency in November at the Espace Culturel de la Faculté d'Education in Montpellier. Drawing on an archive of images and historical narratives linked to the current pandemic context, and an eco-experiment concocting natural inks, the artist has composed a family of plural works in which new creations are incorporated with older ones. Drawings, casts, fabrics and clues to life experience interact through interplay of scale, material and perception in a shifting, synesthetic environment.
During his month-long residency, Geoffrey Badel began researching stories and events from historical periods of social upheaval that echo the current context. From the figure of the "médecin-bec" to the nocturnal and fantastical representations of the Romantic painter Johann Heinrich Füssli, from the time of the Black Death to the dancing epidemic of Strasbourg in 1518, these lines of study formed a corpus of images, texts and gestures from which the artist came to pick fragments in order to propose a fictional space to detect and feel.
The Ex-voto installation is made up of a dozen antique linen sheets dyed with an ink prepared from ingredients found in theriac, once a famous antidote used to treat plague sufferers. The evanescent, ghostly forms of the dye lend a pictorial dimension to the sheets. Suspended wax finger casts seem to glide between the folds, even to rise up. As soon as we enter the exhibition, we find ourselves between two monumental sections of these sheets, from which emanate a strong scent of spices and plants. The installation generates a scenography that splits the exhibition space, modifying our wandering, obstructing our view and revealing the back in its interstices. It suggests we enter an olfactory, therapeutic and intimate space. Fingers act like coins tossed into a wishing well. The hue of the fabrics leads the eye to the drawings on the walls, made on antique paper. Magical and strange figures are depicted without their meaning being revealed. On the floor, plaster casts of hands seem to have escaped from the drawings. These omnipresent haptics are part of the artist's artistic vocabulary, through which he attempts to establish unconscious communication with the visitor's body.
After crossing the sheets, we come face to face with the great Tempestaire fresco. Drawn from vegetable inks also used to dye fabrics, charcoal, wax and soot, it depicts a cosmic landscape in which a giant, naked, androgynous body, with hysterical black hair, brandishes its staff towards the sun. This figure embodies the story of the "médecin-becec", using his staff to examine patients suffering from the Black Death, and also serves as a sign of authority and control. His black hair leads the imagination into Japanese ghost legends such as Yuki-onna. With the ability to transform into a cloud of snow or mist, she helps those lost in the mountains. Each figure and their staging, conceived by the artist, contain multiple fictions, interwoven legends, different cultures or from collective memory, creating an enigmatic mythology that questions our perception and our relationship to a reality that is both concrete and elusive.
The title of the exhibition refers to an invisible, divine being who claimed to be endowed with the power to control celestial phenomena such as storms, floods, earthquakes, famine and epidemics, through the use of magic. This time-maker, present in many mythologies, was considered to be responsible for these terrestrial turbulences. Letting himself be guided by this imaginary world and wrestling with the imagination, Geoffrey Badel reacts to the contemporary context by deploying an immersive space populated by presences and figures on the run, attempting to translate the strangeness present in a universe close to fantastic realism.
