2023-12-29 12:56:11
Strange sculptures float suspended under the Eiffel Magasin hall in Grenoble. Shreds of nets which seem to have drawn on the memory of transatlantic trade to bring up shells, a feather, plastic waste, but also beads and braids, small brass statuettes or goat skin… Sometimes, their shape outlines the bow of a boat, the dark silhouette of a drowned man… “The whole distance to the sea, so that the oil filaments of the manchineel trees can stop our heartbeat. – The rain made this possible, (…) sugar cane, cut leg, hydration to forget »wrote Julien Creuzet in one of the title poems which accompanies his works.
He sculpts, films, dances, slams
At 37, this young man who grew up in Martinique, then trained in art in Caen, Lyon and at Studio Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, was chosen to represent France at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in the spring. 2024. He will be the first artist from overseas to exhibit in the French pavilion since its creation, more than a century ago. Quite a symbol! Julien Creuzet intends to maintain suspense and has not yet revealed anything about his intentions. So, in the meantime, the most curious will make the trip to Grenoble to discover, Le Magasin art centerthe multifaceted creativity of this sculptor, video maker and poet who occasionally slams and dances.
The first video of the tour, a montage of photos of plantation workers, palm trees and tropical birds, taken from old books of the Ministry of Overseas Territories and covered with scarlet paint, immediately evokes a bleeding memory. Around the big screen, Julien Creuzet has painted the walls with achiote, a red seed from the Americas with multiple virtues, exported to Europe to be used, for example, to tint mimolette. In another film, My body is broken…the artist evokes the poisoning of his native land and the dancing bodies of its inhabitants by chlordecone, this pesticide banned in mainland France, but widespread until 1993 in the banana plantations of the Antilles…
By reactivating the colonial history of this trade in bodies and foodstuffs, Julien Creuzet also pays homage to resistance figures such as the Brazilian leader Zumbi dos Palmares, hero of the fight against slavery in Brazil in the 17th century, who ended up beheaded by the Portuguese. In another video, the artist twirls one of his avatars in a nod to the “Possessed of Pigalle”, the dancers of a voodoo temple led in the 1970s in Paris by the Haitian Mathilda Beauvoir. He enters into a trance, before our eyes, covered with dove feathers, and surrounded by atoumo flowers, renowned “cure all ills”.
The art of sharing the poster
Elsewhere, he revives the ancestral links of the Antilles with Africa through the figure of Ogun, this god of fire and iron of the Yorubas, who continues today in the iron dog or “fairy dog” of Martinique, both guardian of houses and psychopomp figure guiding the deceased into the afterlife. In his mixed language mixing English and Creole words, Bèlè music and borrowings from the beliefs of the two continents, does Julien Creuzet practice the art of healing?
On many occasions, his works refer to his favorite authors: the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade, the African-Americans Toni Morrison or Angela Davis, the Martinicans Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant… A teacher at the National School of Fine Arts, he invited three of his former students to exhibit with him in Grenoble, as well as a handful of creators to whom he feels close, such as Bruno Peinado, whose black Michelin man, with an Afro hairstyle and raised fist, was created in reaction to stock market layoffs in this enterprise.
On February 6, Julien Creuzet also intends to present his project for the Venice Biennale from Martinique, with the French Institute, in order to help shine the spotlight on this little-known artistic scene. Always attentive to repairing our truncated vision of the world.
Exhibition “Oh telephone, black oracle (…)”, with Julien Creuzet, at the Le Magasin art center in Grenoble, until May 26, 2024.
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