Tony Matelli
Lion (Bananas), 2022
Installation view at Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, France
TONY MATELLI
Lion (Bananas), 2022
La Cinquième Saison, Paris+ by Art Basel / Musée du Louvre, Paris
On view until October 25th
La Cinquième Saison (‘The Fifth Season’) explores the Jardin des Tuileries - a landscaped garden and historical setting in the center of Paris - as a space of mineral, aquatic, vegetal, animal, and human activity and cohabitation, echoing its main features. The exhibition brings together 26 artists of different generations from across the world, whose artworks are akin to objects imbued with life. They draw our attention to the way the garden moves and to the life at its core, highlighting a world subjected to profound transformation, where environmental concerns go hand in hand with heritage preservation.
The artists invite us to meet the animals that wander around the garden and the plants that grow in it; to discover where water flows and roots emerge; to question where things come from; to notice how stones come alive and how energy can be found in between the cracks. Working with the landscape itself, they highlight our interdependencies, as well as the strengths and weaknesses that define our coexistence with all living things. For them, the relationship to our earthly community is ever-present, and this mysterious ‘fifth season’ should be designed and lived together.
The historical theme of the “Four Seasons”, of which the cycles of paintings by Archimboldo and Nicolas Poussin in the Musée du Louvre's collection are emblematic examples, has been used for centuries by artists to explore the relationship between humans and nature - from the traces that we leave on nature to those nature leaves on us. “The Fifth Season” makes artists participants in the history of landscape in an unprecedented way, at a moment of dramatic environmental transformation.
Lion (Bananas) is an extension of Matelli’s Garden Sculptures series, initiated in 2015, in which he defaces garden statuary of classical or religious icons and subverts material expectation. Based on the classical shape of a lion and installed on a pedestal, the statue, fabricated out of concrete, has been painstakingly aged to mimic a centuries old patina. Scattered across the weathered body are flawlessly handpainted cast bronze bananas in varying degrees of consummation.
These faux-perishables, poised upon the intentionally eroded and debased figure, are presented in an eternal state of freshness. In doing so, Matelli stages opposing entropic forces, the synthetically preserved, and the forcibly decayed.
