This video illustrates the different stages of intervention in the landscape by the artist Jean-Paul Ganem. A painter, he has left his studio for the fields, given up his pencil for a tractor and replaced his brushes with corn, cabbage, red clover and sunflower seeds. In close collaboration with a local farmer, he has traced geometric and graphic forms inspired by features of the landscape on large portions of earth, creating immense living paintings entitled Agricultural Compositions. While emphasizing the relations between art and agriculture, the tape reveals the effects of temporality and the elements of nature on Ganem's work.
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"Over the past five years, Jean-Paul Ganem has considerably enlarged the size of his painting studio in the Paris region. Leaving the studio, he has drawn in the heart of nature, in the depths of the land, what his canvases could no longer contain. No longer content with painting the landscape, he has gradually moved from the role of an artist to that of someone who creates landscapes. Ganem has sown seeds in various regions of France : the Oise, the Vendée, Champagne, Midi-Pyrénées. He has devoted the past two years to his project at Mirabel, documented in the exhibition at Occurence. In Côte St-Pierre, between Boulevard Curé-Labelle and highway 15, he worked 150 hectares of land which had not been cultivated for some time, transforming a landscape into a four-colour painting of corn, canola, sunflower and crimson clover."
RECURT, Elisabeth. «Histoire d'osmose», Occurence gallery, Montreal, Canada
