gallery

Désir d’éternité
[Longing for Eternity]
1995 - 98

Dominique Laquerre is interested in the emotional appropriation of landscapes, where a landscape becomes a backdrop for our memories. A smell, a sound or the picture of a location can be enough to take us back to past events. This appropriation happens through how we experience the location, but also through traces we leave behind – simple traces in wild places: a heart carved on tree bark, words scribbled on a rock…

          “Such traces are felt like ruptures in what is perceived as Harmony. Nature has been defaced. Sometimes, a single initial carved on a tree is more shocking than all of a city’s graffiti. I wanted to go beyond ecological moralism and try to understand this need to leave traces, this quest or wish for an elusive eternity.”
               Dominique Laquerre, 1996

Putting side by side charcoal sketches of landscapes and photographs of graffiti found in nature, these polyptychs highlight both the humility and enormous pretension of the human kind. While weather and living matter are digesting the graffiti, the charcoal sketches are fighting for survival, forming an endless repetition, a laughable attempt at capturing and preserving the moment.

Translated by François Couture