Les Extatiques 2023

For this 6th edition of Les Extatiques, six artists take over the La Défense esplanade, from the Bassin Takis to the Fontaine Agam, around the theme of the 4 elements.

Free exhibition in the public space (Esplanade de La Défense), open daily.

Artists in the program

1. BOB VERSCHUEREN - Tropism
2. AMÉLIE BERTRAND – The Elemental Fingers
3. ERWIN WURM - Breeze - Hoodie
4. JULIEN SALAUD - Falcon Fire
5. PHILIP HAAS – Four seasons, Winter, Spring
6. JÉRÉMY GOBÉ – CorailArtefact CCA1, Neptune's Brain
7. THE EXHIBITION WITHIN THE EXHIBITION - Four elements, seasons, moods, colors

Les Extatiques 2023 - map of works on the Paris La Défense side

1. BOB VERSCHUEREN – Tropism, 2023

Bob Verschueren, Belgium

Bob Verschueren began his artistic approach with painting. His exposure to landscapes led to a fascination with their plant components. He began to use the elements of nature as a means of expression. Using materials taken from spectacular sculptures, evoking both the splendor and decay of all living things. Each piece reflects on man, his life and death, and his relationship with his natural environment. When an installation resonates with the site in which it is installed, it becomes self-evident. a tension between the timelessness of the proposition and its ephemeral nature. Following on from his large-format works, he also creates "plant miniatures" based on leaves and twigs, which he photographs, as well as bronzes based on the same series. Nature is always at the heart of his work.

The work for Paris La Défense

In the Bassin Takis, the emblematic site of Paris La Défense, three boats float, filled with branches, each made up of two boats back to back. They form three horizontal masses in dialogue with the many vertical lines of Takis's work. What are they doing in such a constructed world? They seem to be gathering to head for La Grande Arche!

Tropisme, 2023
Installation, boats joined by two branches
300 × 700 cm

See Bob Verschueren's work at La Seine Musicale

2. AMÉLIE BERTRAND – The Elemental Fingers, 2023

Amélie Bertrand, France

With her impeccably smooth paintings, Amélie Bertrand moves away from ideal landscapes inspired by nature, forming settings between dreams and nightmares. Her planes and surfaces are scaffolded with complexity and meticulousness, only to branch off into skewed perspectives and depthless horizons. All manner of materials and motifs typical of the period saturate the composition: OSB, laminate, mesh, tiles, fleece, chain, foliage, camouflage. Colors are applied in gradations, always in a single layer in a single layer, as if held to the surface of the unfathomable screen. The missing link between Giotto and West Coast painting, Amélie Bertrand matches the great tradition of painting with synthetic psychedelia. She strips painting of its artificial perspectives and syrupy color cocktails, and proceeds to flatten contemporary visual culture.

The work for Paris La Défense

Struck by the profusion of neon signs in the landscape, Amélie Bertrand went looking for neon motifs on the Internet. anonymous generic drawings. The Elemental Fingers consists of a series of images based on nail art signs based on the attributes of the four elements. They synthesize an ultra-contemporary urban landscape influenced by advertising. These works find a particular echo in the visual environment of this rapidly transforming business district. His images images, fluttering like flags, punctuate the route from the Bassin Takis to the Bassin Agam in groups of four. of four. The neon aesthetic, the acid colors, the unreal, almost psychedelic compositions, create a resolutely contemporary ambience with the surrounding advertising space.

The Elemental Fingers, 2023
Digital print on flag mesh, flagpoles
Flags: 150 × 100 cm
Masts: 4 m (H)

3. ERWIN WURM - Breeze – Hoodie, 2023

Erwin Wurm, Austria

Over the course of his career, Erwin Wurm has radically expanded conceptions of sculpture, space and the human form. His sculptures, at the crossroads of abstraction and representation, present familiar objects in a surprisingly inventive way that the viewer to consider them in a new light. He often explores banal, everyday decisions and existential questions in his work, focusing on the objects that help us cope with everyday life and through which we define ourselves. and through which we ultimately define ourselves: our clothes, our car, our food and our home. Erwin Wurm achieves a transformation in the opposite direction when the objects or forms in his work assume distinctly human attributes. distinctly human attributes. In his Stone Sculptures and Tall Bags, he anthropomorphizes objects by perching them on legs and with features or postures that evoke distinct personalities. He has also explored clothing as a sculptural theme in large-scale installations where architectural elements are dressed in knitted sweaters.

The two works for Paris La Défense

With the sculpture Breeze, Erwin Wurm considers clothing in sculptural terms, playing with scale to create the illusion of floating, of taking flight. Dissociated from the human body, the garment loses its substance, defying gravity, but retaining its anthropomorphism while taking on another materiality, that of air.

In dialogue with Breeze, the artist presents for Les Extatiques a second sculpture, a new production: Hoody I. Here, the identifying garment of street culture is removed from the human body, yet retains its physicality. remains firmly anchored to the ground.

Breeze, 2023
Painted aluminum
300 × 110 × 55 cm

Hoody I, 2023
Painted bronze
400 × 128.4 × 80.4 cm

4. JULIEN SALAUD - Falcon fire, 2023

Julien Salaud, France

Julien Salaud studied ethnology before spending three years isolated in the Amazon rainforest in French Guiana, where he worked to protect the environment. On his return to mainland France, he began training in the plastic arts. arts. After several exhibitions in France and abroad, he developed a new artistic approach, drawing on human relationships and creating social links around his artistic practices. Nourished by his many travels and personal experiences he is particularly interested in the power of legends and the imagination. For several years now, Julien Salaud has been working with materials and techniques used by Amerindian peoples: beads, feathers, furs, arrow knots, weaving... He has also turned to working with wax, metal (lead and tin), wood, straw, plaster and, more recently, ceramics.

The work for Paris La Défense

On the Paris La Défense route, Feu de faucon, a mixed technique work combining inflatable structure, painting and sculpture, is placed like a totem on the historic axis. With its majestic wings, it creates a surprise and turns urban aesthetic urban aesthetic codes. From the myth of the phoenix rising from its ashes to the "Karrkanj", the fire-bearing falcons of Aboriginal mythology, the bird/fire association remains a powerful intercultural symbol.

Falcon Fire, 2023
Hand-painted inflatable sculpture
432 × 426 × 283 cm

See Julien Salaud's work at La Seine Musicale

5. PHILIP HAAS – Four seasons, Winter, Spring, 2012-2023

Philip Hass, USA

Philip Haas is a multi-talented artist. As a sculptor, he draws his inspiration from a surrealist aesthetic, notably creating the monumental Four Seasons series, which has been touring museums and gardens for the past twelve years. During the Italian Renaissance, the eccentric paintings of composite heads by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) attracted a fascinated public. They were then rediscovered in the early 20th century when they were adopted by the Surrealists, notably Salvador Dalí and Man Ray. Philip Haas in turn became interested in these works and imagined their sculptural reinterpretation in three dimensions. In a spectacular transformation typical of his work, he created a group of large-scale painted fiberglass sculptures, representing the four seasons. The result is earthy, whimsical and exuberant. The world of classical Renaissance portraiture is transposed to urban landscape, public art and city life, altering the viewer's vision.

The work for Paris La Défense

Philip Haas proposes an original composition, agreeing to separate the seasons on the two exhibition sites, each time drawing inspiration from the nature of the site to renew the approach to his works. On each site, the two seasons face each other, reproducing the effect of Arcimboldo's portraits. Emerging from the earth, fashioned with and by fire, by human labor, these monumental sculptures challenge the scale of urban space and engage visitors with their uchronic aesthetic. At Paris La Défense, in the Place des Reflets, the Winter and Spring seasons play with the site's historical axis.

Four seasons, Winter, Spring, 2012-2023
Pigmented and painted resin
Interior steel structure, 300 × 300 × 500 cm (each)
Edition 1/3

See the work of Philip Haas at La Seine Musicale

6. JÉRÉMY GOBÉ – CorailArtefact CCA1, Neptune's Brain, 2023

Jérémy Gobé, France

After studying at the Beaux-Arts in Nancy and the Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Jérémy Gobé built his work around a central idea; as Auguste Rodin once said, "art that has life does not reproduce the past, it continues it". He goes in search of objects without use and works without shape, workers without works and materials without workers. In the course of his exhibitions in France and abroad, his works impose a reconnection with the living; from ancient know-how that he declines, projects, transforms, Jérémy Gobé proposes us through the imaginary to reflect on solutions likely to respond to contemporary problems. He has won several awards for his Corail Artefact project, which combines art, science and technology to save coral reefs around the world.

The work for Paris La Défense

In the Place Agam, this groundbreaking work, in a radiant blue-green, dialogues with Louis-Ernest Barrias's 1883 statue La Défense de Paris. 140 years on, contemporary art takes up the defense of endangered coral reefs and invites viewers to change their perspective and outlook on this rapidly changing world.

CorailArtefact CCA2, Neptune's Brain, 2023
CCA2 ecological concrete invented by the artist, projected onto a recycled metal structure and plant weave
Iridescent patina
450 × 225 cm

See Jérémy Gobé's work at La Seine Musicale

7. THE EXHIBITION WITHIN THE EXHIBITION - Four elements, seasons, moods, colors, 2023

15 pieces of street furniture provided by JC Decaux are used to present a selection of images interpreting the theme of the four elements through the history of art, as well as the guest artists' answers to the question "Which element do you most like? to the question "Which element corresponds to you the most? Based on the theory of the four humors popularized by Hippocrates, the selection associates the four elements that make up the cosmos and the human body with the four seasons and the four human moods:

• sanguine: air, spring, white, red ;
• angry: fire, summer, yellow, orange, bright red;
• melancholic: earth, autumn, brown, violet, black
• phlegmatic: water, winter, pale green, opal.

And for the very first time in the history of Les Extatiques, Paris La Défense is collaborating with a local operator to offer an extension to this photographic exhibition, which continues in the Hyfive building, in partnership with Icade, around the following works:

• Ceres and the Allegories of the Four Elements (1605) by Jan Brueghel the Elder;
• Travaux des champs, Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (1413-1416) by the Limbourg brothers. In this work, the elements are associated with the seasons and the twelve signs of the zodiac;
• The complexions, Four men standing on fire, water and earth. A castle in the background (1482) by Jean du Riès. In this work, the four temperaments are associated with the four elements;
• The Four Seasons (1573) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo.