Born in 1958 in Nice (FR)
Lives and works in Paris (FR) and Berlin (DE)
1992
Cupboard, clay, frosted glass
232 x 118 x 50 cm
Year of Purchase: 1994
Like a door giving onto the opaqueness of memory, Jérôme Basserode’s work is incorporated in time, in the fragmented matter of a nomadic world. His works are architectures of thought, metaphors of an organized world which is gradually drawing away from the original and undifferentiated chaos of nature, and blossoming into fullness.
Here, the natural elements often used by the artist (trees, peat, leaves, seeds, clay…) find their way into constructed objects and containers [houses, boxes, wardrobes, drawers, shells…) whose rigorous principle of classification destroys all manner of sentimentalism about nature, and introduces the organization of reason which lies at the root of everything. In the tradition of Broodthaers, the poetic inclusion of the living in Basserode’s work is an act of language, a sign of culture which refuses the indeterminate nature of the subject and creates meaning as a developing principle and a tool of manipulation. However, the control of the ‘brain’ is at work in experimentation on the boundaries of contradiction, paradox and inversion/reversal.
The moveable door of the Tohu Bohu wardrobe invites the viewer to a game with the hidden, the buried secret, while at the same time contradicting his expectation, during the opening, by way of the perceived paradox, of the glazed ‘veil’ and the intrusion of the wall. Fragment, fissure, near and far, all literally present, construct a visual metaphor of the aura as W. Benjamin defines it. As quotations and mosaics of the work of memory, the elements with which Basserode builds are the objects of the slow metamorphosis of thought. The duality between outside and in, between transparency and opaqueness, is enclosed within the heart of reality and the artist uses it as a tendency to movement.
Maïté Vissault