Philippe Mayaux's Hybrid Worlds at Galerie Loevenbruck

Philippe Mayaux's exhibition at Galerie Loevenbruck in Paris ran from September 20 to November 3, 2001. The artist is described as a joyful pugilist who emerges from furious melees with supple limbs, attentive to the unpredictable. He crystallizes strangeness within the familiar and connects distant representations. His paintings and objects capture an imagination that forges its own path, constantly perverting its own growths and accidents. This improvisational ability rejects mastery of knowledge; instead, Mayaux follows the recalcitrant material, responding with feints and dodges. His art of attack lies in flexibility, which is both redoubtable and light. He mixes science and fiction, organic and grotesque, fantasy and monstrosity, nursery rhyme and disturbing slippage. Motifs of bellicose moods, dangerously benign insects, curiously reactive organisms, and whimsical objects dissolve boundaries and open the way to strange alliances. This hybridity might seem a burden, but changing one's attitude reveals it as an opportunity to coordinate diverse elements without subordinating them. The excesses make these recipes and tricks acts of irreverence and alertness, with devastating comic effects. This decapitating variety, indifferent to ordered logic, aims at something both hilarious and seriously unsettling. The text is by Didier Arnaudet.