«Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself.

It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.»

Song of Myself de Walt Whitman (1892).

The exhibition Genesis at Foco Gallery is an endless journey, a journey that goes beyond all maps and guides. A trip that may sound familiar. A road that we may have already adopted. The artists immerse us in this experience. We, spectators, oscillate between the sensation of a first time and an impression of déjà vu.

Genesis is both a question and several answers by the plurality of practices and the point of view of the four guest artists. It is a pamphlet or a manifesto: The world is not built up and down. Even degraded, a new life can be born out of this world. The works invoke the intangible, the spiritual, the sensory and extra-sensory experience as a memorial. All the stimuli have a natural element as a starting point: light, temperature, sound, soil, water … The purpose is not the documentation but to show how each works in their ways allow a deeper and more specific understanding of our need to explain and understand the world.

Each artist solicits our imagination to draw organic relationships beyond the human experience. Through their presented sculptures, Ana + Betania raise a new form of subtle life that is created from the ruins of our world, both in heaven and on earth.
For this initiatory journey, trace, time, light, writing intertwine in the works of Hugo Cantegrel and proposes the horizon as objective.
The photographs of Paula Guimarães, superimposed landscapes, are an ode to a universe dominated by nature.
As for Pauline Guerrier’s proteiform works, they are in the tradition of her practice, where the aesthetic experience is like a meditation.
They are all imprints of the landscape, the earth, the mountain and the moon. Either together or alone, the works become evocations of a form of resistance to persist and exist, like a new genesis.

Text by Jeanne Mercier