On January 28th, PIASA is offering an auction entitled (Very) Contemporary Art. The first of its kind, this auction inaugurates a new cycle of vacations devoted to the most contemporary creation. A work by Camille Henrot will be presented to collectors during this sale.
Camille Henrot (Born 1978)
Haut relief (7), 2009
Estimate: 12000 / 18000 €
This work by Camille Henrot, High relief (7), 2009 is part of a series of moulds of plastic bags in sandstone and plaster recovered in Saquara, Cairo, Egypt. It was exhibited at the Kamel Mennour Gallery in 2009 in conjunction with the screening of the video Cynopolis, 2009. Other works of this type were shown as part of the exhibition Nous ne mourrirons pas ensemble at the Centre d'art Le Lait, Castres.
This project brings together two reigns of time: the result of an immense duration - geology - and the ephemeral moment during which a plastic bag adopts this form, before being swept away by time. It is an anachronistic drawing. On a spatial level, the object brings together two scales: the minute detail and the geological erosion of a territory. It is both an anecdotal and a historical object. A banal object takes on a historical value with time, the same time that will eventually make it disappear. This work is also related to Egyptian art. High relief preceded the art of bas-relief among the Egyptians. All of their art was moreover oriented towards the idea of surviving time and prolonging life in a static eternity. The same is true of the plastic bag, which is destined to survive in its form. We could thus take up the definition given by G. Didi Huberman's definition of the organic interpretation of plasticity, which "unites body and style in the same question of time: survival and metamorphosis will end up characterising the eternal return itself, the form in its vocation to informality".1
