The work of Karolina Voleska and Tomas Kurecka, Excuse Me, Didn't You Lose Your Baggage?, is taking place in OKNA gallery. This creative space concentrates mostly on the modern and contemporary art from Central Eastern Europe. It opened on the 1st of August and will last till the 15th of August. 

In the room, on three walls painted black, small wooden boxes are hung. The boxes are open and present white (in some places shiny like a pearl) material that forms abstract shapes. The background to them provides a zoomed-in picture of dry grass and a rose that lays on hay. In the center of the room, visitors can see a little platform covered with black material, with a black rose in the middle. 

As the artists suggest, this world "holds fragmented remains of an ancient poem, Roman de la Rose, dragged into the present world". Because the exhibition holds a bit of mystery, the hint about the poem included in the description of the work becomes a key to solving this elaborate artistic story. 

The Roman de la Rose is a French text created in medieval times. It tells a story of chevalier love. The lover, led by a mysterious power, ends up in the walls of an orchard whose owner is Déduit (an Old French word for pleasure). Here the lover must seek for his love, the Rose. During his journey, he is assisted by many different characters that in modern times are interpreted mostly as allegories of particular aspects of affection. 

While focusing on the shapes enclosed in the wooden boxes, segments of the body might appear. On the first abstract view, they seem to form shapes that are emerging from their structure while watching. The viewer can discover the explicit character of the flesh enchanted into the plaster with the pearly layer that covers their vulgarity. From the deformed material, in the eyes of the observer, emerge reproductive organs, uterus, testicles. The symbols of the physical form of love are exposed in frames, separately. 

If visitors follow the hints shared with them in the piece description, they can discover that the forms in the boxes are deformed faces that are gazing on the gallery spaces, observing the love scene that happens inside, between the viewers and the rose. Entering the room, spectators become part of, or are rather caught in, this unique garden in the middle of which the rose can be found. The relation between body and gallery space changes - visitors that usually are looking at the piece of art are now observed by the art itself. This feeling gives a bit of a thrill of the unknown. 

While entering the gallery space, the visitor enters a unique type of hortus delicarium. The garden of pleasure was a place to which the rigorous rules of everyday life did not apply. Here, wealthy women could enjoy cultural and intellectual amusements, hidden from the judging gaze of others. Now, the space between the viewer, gallery, and this piece becomes a unique place, where different kinds of pleasures can be experienced. What is worth noticing is the fact that there are seven boxes on the walls. The hortus delicarium was also considered a place where seven liberal arts could be experienced. This is why the boxes can be also interpreted as these arts. The gallery becomes a secret garden of love, where the black rose lays on the black platform, covered with a mournful shroud. Even though it seems passive, the rose, a metaphor of love, becomes the center of all the events. 

The additional mystery that put another interpretational layer to this piece is included in the title: Excuse Me, Didn't You Lose Your Baggage? This seems like a bit of a weird question to ask, as a person who loses baggage usually notices it. Then, what exactly is the baggage in this context and who is the one that asks this question? It can be interpreted as an emotional heaviness that is lost while entering the frivolous, unique garden of love. Observing the masks in the windows, created with the wooden boxes, may silently be asking this question. It's the emotional baggage that is lost when we are entering a garden of fresh romance, away from judgmental eyes and critics. 

Even though the work is quite elaborate, what is missing is the key that would connect them into one logical structure. Multiple interpretations that pop up while looking at the piece brings down the wholeness of the composition. It may seem like a disadvantage of this work. However, it highlights the complexity and hardness of clearly defining the art of love and art itself. 

Back from Alma, where he was in cross-residency with the art center Langage Plus, Jonathan Naas has invested the CEAAC in Strasbourg this last month, to continue the work started in Québec.

Jonathan Naas, Superstition / Supervision, Tarot d'Alma, Arcanes Majeures, 2020 © Sébastien Zimmermann

 After exploring three cryptids figures derived from local folklore in Invincible Invisible exhibition, and to question how the invisible is embodied in mythological characters, the proposition provided by Supervision Superstition is more about how some daily objects can be involved in some strange and dark rituals, invested by irrationality, coincidences, and superstition we put in them.

Visitors are then invited to walk into a strange forest of intimidating sculptures, which the dark and opaque colors seems to absorb all the light, increasing the feeling of darkness and latent fears. In this way, Jonathan Naas inject some dark sacred in the white neutrality of the gallery, and it's feel like we are discovering the burnt ruins of an ancient place, where obscure and pagan rituals used to take place. Geometric form are merging in the particular way artist arranged some everyday objects : on a wall, a set of kitchen knifes drawing an esoteric symbol, stacked tires become an altar, a temple door to another world, or guardian of this unknown world, as the “Moloch” pieces. 

Jonathan Naas, Superstition/Supervision, 2020 - Exhibition's view © Sébastien Zimmermann

 

So, except for a couple of little birds, entitled “The watcher”, and a tarot cards collection, the artist has chosen to works with functional materials which the common use isn't to be seen, but to provide a mechanical move, a support, a protection. It doesn't take long to recognize in some objects the superstitions or the myths they are associated to, like the ladders or the witch's broom. Thus, primary functions are shifted : ladders don't carry workers but old fears, and opened umbrella don't protect you from rain anymore ; rather, it seems to be a door open to many misfortunes.

Jonathan Naas, Superstition/Supervision Pentagram III, bois brûlé, peinture thermique, rituel 2020 © Sébastien Zimmermann

By playing with forms and functions, new forces are arising from this simple objects : more than tools, they evoke a powerful and invisible force. Objects, then, seems to hold multiples stories, like fetishes, voodoo dolls, or relics. In this universe, knowledge, as light, is absorbed and enclosed in modern totem. And we, visitors, are invited to decipher this encrypted alphabet made of esoteric forms and magical gestures.

Thus, the artist drive us to question how the visible can be an opening to the invisible, by displacing forms and creating new symbols for contemporary imaginary. But he's also making a reflection on how the knowledge transfer can take several forms, including symbols, fiction, allegories and how this different transmission mode can be used. We can think about how gospels and parables, tales and mythologies was used to transmit knowledge before the dissemination and development of written language. And when writing and literacy made people able to access to more knowledge, how orality has become a way to preserve some important, sacred, or exclusive knowledge.

This communication mode also echoes contemporary online practices, like using and diverting pictures in mème, cryptic sentences only made of emoji, or, in the way big companies merely using symbols like logo and storytelling to construct modern myths around their brand names and a feeling of belonging to a (more or less) exclusive group of followers. Progressively, we realize that even in a time in which rationality and technical progress seems to be the watchword for most of so-called modern societies, some opaque beliefs remain and influence, more than we could imagine, our behaviors. And by confronting everyday objects with all the irrationals forces they can carry, Jonathan Naas makes old and nested fears and beliefs come up to the surface of everyday life, and imagination a powerful tool to draw and reinvent our behaviors.

Superstition / Supervision
by Jonathan Naas
Centre Européen d'Actions Artistiques Contemporaines
7, rue de l'abreuvoir,
67000 STRASBOURG
https://ceaac.org/fr/

See more work by Jonathan Naas on his site : http://www.naas.fr/