China’s place today? Jean Pierre Giovanelli, in a poetic, often metaphorical manner, gives us a glimpse. To fully understand his approach, one must remember that he is an architect. He is a visionary, imagining inhabited space.
His vision of the world is divided into several parts: the visual which is what one sees, the auditory which is what one hears, the material which is what one touches, and the immaterial which is what one feels, the perceived, we could say the spiritual. The artist questions the consumer society.
This society is obsessed with always having more: faster, more money, more goods (often trivial), more and more. A headlong rush with a constantly eluding goal, a horizon that recedes as one advances, a futile quest, a society whose ideal would be vain. On a superficial level, China appears contradictory. This communist country is today the engine of capitalism.
A deeper reading, a more intellectual analysis, will reveal this paradox. Since the dawn of time, China has been guided by Taoism, a philosophy of balance between two opposites. From this, one better understands this marriage of disparate elements.
China is neither communist nor capitalist in the Western sense of these two schools of thought. It may have achieved this societal transformation, the stages of history as defined by Marx. This definition of the steps to follow to achieve the society idealized by his theory.
Jean Pierre Giovanelli thus synthesizes two fundamentally opposing theses. He demonstrates the mechanisms through which man deludes himself into believing he is free, while it is actually liberalism, and demonstrates democracy whose meaning fluctuates.
The Western society would thus be an illusion and our perception a manipulation. Buddha, symbol of wisdom, meditation, and transcending the human soul, tramples the star-spangled banner of the United States as well as a bag full of money, this incessant thirst for domination and material possession.
Subtle and invisible chains alienate men through the thirst to consume. Mao and the long march, the brilliance of red, scarlet, blood, light, and sun, the symbol of victory. Symbolism is paramount here: the almighty dollar and this wall between the living and the dead. One must pay the passage of the Styx to acquire immortality. Pantheism, polytheism, monotheism are represented here. The East and the West (that of Greco-Latin civilization) merge. A video accompanies the exhibition.
Jazz enthusiasts will be thrilled. Louis Armstrong, we are in the Depardieu gallery, a temple of jazz, a cellar, a little Saint Germain, Mao appears, and his image becomes less austere, he becomes more humane. A touch of humor or a wink? Madoff, the American crook, and that ironed dollar bill. Here, one should see a purification, dirty money cleansed, purified, if it can indeed be made clean.
China, a dragon with feet of clay? At least that’s the definition given by our leaders. We know the fate of peremptory statements: the Titanic was unsinkable, and the Maginot line unbreakable. When China awakens! Yet the Middle Kingdom has indeed awakened.
An exhibition at the Depardieu gallery not to be missed. China Food, rice and chopsticks. A journey into this Middle Empire where more than a billion human beings live. China becoming capitalist? Probably not. This country is marked by the wisdom of balance, of Taoism. A spiritual country, in fact.
An exhibition at the heart of China’s soul, thanks to Jean Pierre Giovanelli and Christian Depardieu for this exhibition visible until November 28, 2015.
Thierry Jan
