The Roebuck’s Revival…
15 May - 18 June 2022
Frédérick Mouraux is honored to present a beautiful new body of work by Erik Samakh for the artist’s second solo show in his gallery in Brussels.
Erik Samakh’s exhibition gives us the opportunity to discover or rediscover the unique universe of the internationally recognized French artist. Samakh’s work is born out of a constant dialogue between Man and Nature. In fact, he presents himself as a hunter-gatherer.
In his last meeting with the artist, the French art historian Pascal PIQUE wrote about the works soon to be exhibited in the Brussels gallery:
[...] Erik Samakh's latest paintings, which are also his first, awaken something of this triple connection to nature, to the animal and to the Invisible. By following the tracks of the animal, the artist has found the trace of the hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic. It is by reliving their practice of hunting that he has awakened certain forgotten perceptions and sensations. This is probably why his paintings have something of the parietal about them, delivering the animal in a movement comparable to that found on the walls of the decorated caves of Chauvet or Lascaux. [...]
[...] Let's remember that Erik Samakh has an acute awareness of environmental issues, that he has been living from the inside for over forty years now. This is why he is one of the pioneers of an art of reconnection to nature and ecosystems, notably through a work of sounds and images that he has developed since the 1980s. This has led him to settle [...] on a 20-hectare territory that has become his studio. An open-air laboratory, in direct contact with the earth, the trees and the river, where he experiments with forms of interaction with plants, minerals and animals. A laboratory where he works with the non-human while transforming himself. [...]
[...] Erik Samakh reinvents in a scathing way the question of our relationship to the environment, to nature, to ecology, to the living (and thus to death), through a double work of ethological restoration and artistic sacralization.
It is indeed a question here of survival, in the multiple senses of the term. Survival first as the first work of the human animal to provide for its needs and ensure the continuity of the species. Survival also through the shamanic referent, which rests on the idea of the revival, or survival, of the soul and the spirit after death. [...]
By awakening in us a sensory universe linked to the natural environment, Erik Samakh presents a remarkable new body of work in the gallery, that echoes our belonging to the great mysteries of nature.
Frédérick Mouraux
Please find below a selection of images :
The Roebuck’s Revival…
2021 © Erik Samakh
2021 © Erik Samakh
2022 © Erik Samak “Self-portrait”, video, 30 min