26 Feb 2010

CLIMAX REDVX an exhibition about extreme natural phenomena

With Darren Almond, Ueli Berger, Trisha Donnelly, Thomas Flechtner, Geert Goiris, Joachim Koester, Sarah Lis, Allan McCollum, Didier Marcel, Mathieu Mercier, Adrien Missika, Philippe Rahm, Pierre Vadi and Guido van der Werve

The representation of natural forces has a long tradition in Western painting. In particular during the Romantic period, when raging winds, thunderstorms, deluges and erupting volcanoes have made viewers shudder with a 'delightful horror.' (1) The aesthetic attraction to the fury of elements and the harsh and dramatic aspects of the landscape alludes, moreover, to a sacred dimension. The grandiose appearance of these physical phenomena consists in the expression of a suprasensible reality, the scene of the sublime.

Nowadays, spectacular natural phenomena and their tangible hazards (the frequency of hurricanes, the raising of sea levels, earthquakes, tsunamis…) paint a gloomy picture. If they testify first to the changing reality of a nature in perpetual transformation, they also represent facets of a threat which participates in an anxiety-provoking climate, not to say apocalyptic. Their massive outbreak is part of a drift, exacerbated by the media, which combines a strange morbid fascination with the conjuration of imminent terrors. So, they still function, even today, as a representation of what cannot be represented, of what is behind the scene or of the hereafter, as a potential for mystery and a source of projections for the viewer

In this spirit, the CLIMAX REDVX collective exhibition offers an atypical journey through extreme telluric and climatic upheavals. A series of images which are not subservient to the norms of the visible but belong to its fringes : spaces which are most often indeterminate and irresolute. This selection of artworks has also been conceived as a rise in dramatic intensity since the word '"climax", as a figure of speech, refers both to a gradation and to the final term or the acme of a tension.

CLIMAX was the title of a video program originally conceived in 2006 for the Louis-Jeantet Foundation for medecine (Geneva) and then presented at CosmoCaixa Science Museum during the 2008 edition of the LOOP video festival (Barcelona). Since then, it has been conceived as a collective exhibition and supplemented by further artworks, hence its new title : CLIMAX REDVX (2) .


Eveline Notter
Curator of the exhibition


(1) Burke E., A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1987 [1757], p. 73.

(2) The Latin word redvx meaning 'brought back,' 'returned.'