La Chute de l'homme, after Hugo van der Goes, 2021 Photography variable dimensions
In pictorial representations, the sexualization of women is rooted in a symbolic system: linked either to original sin or to the origins of life, it conveys allegorical automatisms. The photograph La Chute de l'homme, by Hugo van der Goes (2021) uses the pose of the sinful Eve, whose sex is hidden by an iris.
La Coquille, d'après Odilon Redon combines a pastel by Odilon Redon made just after Courbet's L'Origine du monde with a theory by Ernst Haeckel, a disciple of Darwin, confirming the origin of life in the seabed in the 19th century. These revivals are often shown on a wallpaper scale.
Popularly known as the "Saint of Birds", St. Francis of Assisi, while traveling with a few companions in Italy's Spoleto valley, noticed a flock of birds gathered at the foot of a tree in a large field of earth. Inspired, he decided to preach a sermon on God's love for them and the possibility of a sensus communis between man and beast. In this idea of encompassing animals in the same community of living beings, and in claims that were already ecologist and animalist, St. Francis then defended the idea that the Earth "takes care of us" and that man should not dominate it. Yet in this photographic reworking of a Giotto fresco, the birds have disappeared. Taken in an agricultural field where wading birds are on the verge of extinction, the photograph shows that man has not respected the saint's words. Only a sound archive can restore the purity of a shared language.
The covers are quotations from historical paintings in which the artist's body designates, as in books of emblems, a concept to be meditated upon.