After The Future

 

2014-2015
 

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Concrete residue of an ephemeral existence. Wandering entities with immutable movement. The only traces of a humanity now lost. The poetics of Thierry Konarzewski [Benin, 1960], painter, sculptor and photographer, takes its roots in these postulates. He uses plastic waste as a “metaphor for the human soul” to transcribe reality as a place in which man manifests himself in his absence.

In this residue that he leaves, but which reveals everything about himself.

Relics of a humanity today reaching its limits, the subjects of the works do not become spokespersons for militant environmentalism, but are configured as poetic compositions which reflect "giving life to what has already been experienced" . A dimension, this one, in which the falls emerge as ambassadors of the artist's thoughts, questions and intimate anxieties, thus going beyond the banality of the visible to bear witness to the passage from ephemeral life to unknown eternity. Like a diary whose opening can spontaneously provoke sensations in the observer that do not belong to the author, the works present themselves as an anthropology of the object as concrete in its formal aspect as in abstract in its ideal dimension.

It is in fact in the perfect harmony of two different temporalities that the process of artistic creation takes shape: a long “stream of consciousness”, in which thoughts, suggestions and ideas circulate freely until the occurrence of an intimate event, psychological or mental; a signal that leads to the creation of an image in the artist's mind, of a creative response, in which what will be the future project is already taking shape. A project in which the daily dimension of waste gives way to aniconic entities, the fruit of our actions, a mirror of our civilization and our memory.

However, the long reflection that led to the "definition of an idea" does not always remain unchanged, as was the case with the series After the Future, in which the visit to a magnificent deserted winter landscape, populated by waste plastics arriving from the sea, undermined Konarzewski's initial idea, leaving room for suggestions born from the place. A place where the artist and the future subjects of the works were known, recognized and perceived as elements of the same movement. That, dynamically unstable, of human existence: an existence whose waste is the only testimony of a past life. A life which, from them, can nevertheless be rewritten, reinterpreted, relived, like a new story within history.

New life in life.

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Nicoletta Biglietti

Utopiche seduzioni  - 2023/2024 - Fondazione Dino Zoli 

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Is it the passion for loneliness and isolation? Taste for the desert and meditation? Thierry Konarzewski scum kilometers of shoreline and as an archivist photographer, a possible survivor of a plastic civilization, he gleans objects, looks at them and transforms them. Priest of a possible redemption of things, he celebrates on a case of sand, these strange shapes, gigantic idols of a civilization to come. What triumph, these sculptures that play with proportions, do they announce? Are they the messengers of a world without men? or the lookouts of a new humanity to come?

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Thierry Grillet - Writer

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If our bulimic civilization were to disappear one day, suffocated, I would be the last man. The survivor, the one who trudges down the long beaches of the infinite ocean looking for a sign, looking for an other. The horizon will be so empty, so deserted that the plastic debris I run across will be the only proof of my past. I will look at it deeply, thirstily, to remember. It will be vast and precious in my eyes.

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2014 - Landes, Atlantic ocean

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