Thomas Dane Gallery,London
If spliced buttocks, breasts and goat legs are symbols of a nation in decline, and let’s own more of them – this is contemporary art at its wicked best[br] I am in a ghostly garden of some forgotten chateau where grey lichen-marked statues loom in the mist among once-pollarded,now madly overgrown, trees. OK, and I made up the chateau,the mist and the trees – but they are all evoked by Jean-Luc Moulène’s eerie installation of concrete rococo sculpture.
At first glimpse his groups of nudes and fauns appear time-worn and authentic. Then you see how he has hacked through these concrete casts with a powerful cutting tool and spliced them together in weirdly unsettling groups. Buttocks and breasts, goat legs and modest downcast eyes are disturbingly spliced together in a manic montage, and the classical tradition gone psycho. Who says French culture is dead? Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com