The nostalgia for a planet that might still retain something wild, or even simply for a planet that might remain a habitable environment for human beings, animal species and plant life, lies at the very foundation of David Décamp’s work.
Sections of trees are encased in lead sheathing, as though charred in the aftermath of a fire, or protected against some climatic change that might otherwise condemn them. These same trees can take on the appearance of a spinal column, becoming the remains of a creature that would survive only in skeletal form.
Then there are animal bones, displayed like relics, at once minute and magnificent, which also come to inhabit this world, inseparable from humanity’s self-destructive impact on the planet. The title of the exhibition says it all: Terminarès. In contemporary language, the word means to finish, to bring something to an end, and even, in the commercial world, a cut-price sale, a kind of festive clearance of goods of varying quality before stocks run out or the business closes down. The word also carries a slang connotation that overwhelms the scholarly origin of the term, derived from the Latin verb terminare. We are closing down, David Décamp seems to tell us. “Pack your bags”: yet the washbasin that is melting away has just destroyed our belongings, shattering our hopes of escaping an uninhabitable world. There is no way out.
So what is left to sell? A few remnants of nature. What is about to close for good?
The planet as we knew it roughly half a century ago, before scientists coined the term Anthropocene, at a time when the effects of industrialisation on the ecosystem were not yet as perceptible as they are today, in the age of global warming. David Décamp did not wait for these discourses, or for this very belated awakening of awareness, before becoming concerned with these issues. His childhood spent among the forests of the Jura, to which he constantly returns, his knowledge of trees, which formed the basis of his first profession, his fascination with bark and leaves, his attentiveness to animals: art has simply translated into forms, objects and installations what, for him, was a landscape as ever-present and fundamental as it was threatened.
This is what prevents his works, and all the lived experiences surrounding them, from belonging to the belated ecological conscience characteristic of our societies, simultaneously anxious about climate disruption and still as voracious as ever for goods and energy. Nor do they belong to the highly self-interested concern that many artists have shown in recent years for these issues, at a time when international biennials intersect with the climate negotiations of the “COP” conferences.
“It’s as though I wanted to drill into the heads of those who come to look at my work.” “There is the idea of a Stations of the Cross, without that actually being the subject.” These are two remarks, among many others, from conversations I have been having with David Décamp for several months, or rather, when I think about it, for years now, and which I have occasionally written down.
There is indeed something sacred about his works. An atmosphere of reliquaries permeates them, of suffering and catacombs, but also of devotion. Yet the martyrology here is that of the trees he encases or whose bark he preserves, of the plane-tree leaves he depicts with painstaking, extravagant precision, of the bronze corpses of birds he collects, of the deer he lays out in lead coffins, of the frogs whose thigh bones, as slender as twigs, he gathers, of the fish whose skeletons he reconstructs, transforming them into elegant and unsettling mobiles reminiscent of natural history museums.
As for devotion, it is that of the artist who gathers all these fragments of living things, the very opposite of the ascetic who withdraws from the real and contingent world, having internalised the catastrophe to the point of no longer seeing it. It is against this figure, identified by Michaël Foessel, of the spectator who is simultaneously aware of ecocide and passive, as informed as they are unwilling to act, that David Décamp’s art comes to distract us, only to return us more forcefully to our real world, that is, to our practices, our habits, our way of life. His works strike against our heads, sometimes entering them, piercing our very bones.
For his work also contains a lesson about the economy of making that underpins our possession of objects, things and works, those we own or those that merely pass through our lives, quickly consumed or discarded.
To spend an entire day making a dead leaf, with all its veins and mottled spots, not simply to imitate its appearance, but to imitate time itself at work through the seasons; to spend an entire day carving a fragment of bone, as craftsmen once did. To use pieces or buttons carved long ago by other hands and turn them into a vanitas.
An entire economy of manual labour, far removed from today’s mechanised production, in which the role of both the hand and time continues to diminish, lies at the heart of David Décamp’s work. Alongside the natural resources that must be preserved, there is another resource, that of the hand, which must instead be used without any real measure, without any precise notion of time.
In La Région centrale (1969), Michael Snow attempted to create an absolute recording of what he described as an “extremely rare commodity: wilderness.” David Décamp’s works bring other such commodities into view, composed of things as minute as they are dazzling, marvellous remnants that point back to the same increasingly scarce wilderness, yet one that is never entirely lost, for it is rediscovered in all these fragments, these threatened naturalia, and in the gestures that restore them to the world.
François-René Martin
Professor of Art History at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris