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26.09.2019

Ça donne à réfléchir

14N61W, Fort-de-France, Martinique
September 14, 2019 – October 26, 2019

SENTIER left Martinique two years ago after living there for thirty years. He now lives in Finistère Nord, Brittany (France). He works to build an economic model around his practices and to establish other relationships in a territory he did not know before settling there. It’s very stimulating to start from scratch, he likes to feel foreign, to have no bearings and to grope blindly. To him, rooting poses multiple problems. It is the same thing in artistic practice, it seems to him necessary to exceed the technical and theoretical achievements. Life and art are inseparable. It is not about forgetting, it is, of course, impossible, but rather to free oneself from the sociocultural obstacles unfortunately inherent to the apprenticeship, and to stay closer to the origin of the desire of production and communication. But be careful, do not understand here the origin as a punctual moment frozen in the past. SENTIER experiences a visceral aversion for any form of nostalgia. The origin is an ever-present thing that accompanies everything that is born and appears. It’s much more interesting to think like that, it’s more dynamic. The origins are all gaps, spurts that disturb the course of existence.

When he was a child he liked to cut pieces of wood with a penknife, spending hours carving. SENTIER spent a lot of time in his adult life trying to find the sensations he felt at the time in this activity. Constantly looking for this intense commitment of doing, in which children seem to be able to dive effortlessly. Sometimes he approaches it, but of course, it does not have the same flavor. It must be said that the experience reveals many abominable things that led him to note the vanity of all hope. However, he does not speak of renunciation, because in spite of the big and small disasters, past and certainly to come, SENTIER is inhabited by a powerful desire for improvement as well for him as for the world, a raw hope without a goal and real object. Maybe it’s just a desire to be. In any case, it is still impossible to conclude that no opening exists.

Art is an open field without limits. Everyone can do it. Like any free activity, like any free labor, it allows one to discover the extent of one’s possibilities and one’s freedom. The artist’s concern is to work, to produce without preconceived ideas. He seeks to strip himself of the remains of guilt that the psychological manipulations to which we have all been subjected since our earliest childhood have imprinted in our beings.

Art is an open field without limits. Everyone can do it. Like any free activity, like any free labor, it allows one to discover the extent of one’s possibilities and freedom. The artist’s concern is to work, to produce without preconceived ideas. It seeks to strip itself of the remains of guilt that the psychological manipulations to which we have all been subjected since our earliest childhood have imprinted in our beings.

We live with all these negative feelings that societies, communities, collectives push us to have on ourselves because we are not aware of it. It must change. It is not easy, however, to regurgitate all these poisons that we have all been force-fed from our earliest moments, it is certainly the work of a lifetime. The practice of art is a great tool to achieve this, it is even a shortcut. Each piece of art is a sawn bar to get out of the cage. Art is everywhere, even outside of art. As soon as someone strives to collect pieces and assemble them to produce a meaningful form, in any field, in SENTIER’s eyes, it is art.

When we practice, we realize very quickly that what we produce does not come from our consciousness, but that it is rather the convergence of multiple intentions emanating from those who preceded us or who we live side by side, whether they are human or non-human, living or not. All things are individuated and finite form, delimited in space-time.

Each thing marks its environment during its existence and all the people who take some of these traces to show the reality of the incessant transformation of the world, in their singular way, are artists. The works exhibited by SENTIER on the occasion of this exhibition are the fruits of his speculations. He uses cardboards to make matrixes that he inks and then prints on a beautiful paper using an intaglio printing press. The result is a unique print that he edits if necessary, in colored pencil and tempera paint.

14n61w.org

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