Taking the form of dreamlike visual narratives, Outremondes brings together works that explore themes of disappearance and hidden worlds. Drawings made with pastel and charcoal depict transforming bodies where dreamed universes and species declared extinct species take root. Paper objects, composed of delicate plant motifs, take us on a journey on wooden walkways that seem to span worlds.
Between erasure and appearance, bodies interact with plants, insects, and landscapes. In order to preserve the memory of these vanished species, La Perrière reproduces them with precision and sensitivity. In her works imbued with poetry, at once gentle and tragic, flowers and insects take root or settle on anonymous human bodies, devoid of faces. The artist thus symbolically links the fate of these extinct species to the human species, who is primarily responsible for their extinction. Véronique thus invites us to reflect on the precariousness of each species, including our own.
About the works from the Last Seen series, 2024:
“The Last Seen series” explores, through a poetic lense, themes of disappearance and the relationships among living beings. Focusing on the flora and insects that have vanished in the human era, the images envision the return and transformations of extinct species. In the face of global biodiversity collapse, the work seeks to illuminate how the denial of limits, and our own finiteness, is reflected in our exploitation of nature. How does our relationship, or lack thereof, with death in our era express itself in our denial of ecological boundaries? How can we re-enchant death and the relationships among the living beings who inhabit our planet?
Although the extinction rate of plants is twice that of animals, it largely goes unnoticed. These species, which produce the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, and filter the water we drink, have reached a rate of extinction that is exponential. These disappearances are, according to scientific indicators, harbingers of the dawn of a sixth mass extinction. When a plant or an insect disappears, it is a member of the community with a specific role and relationships to other species that dies. It is also millennia of adaptation and an invaluable potential of biological, ecological, and pharmacological information that vanishes.
Like visions of the future, the images from the Last seen series are rituals for contemplating death, which connects the living among themselves and to the species that have disappeared and those yet to come. Through the poetic, the work hopes to contribute to a reconciliation with our finiteness and the tragedy of the living.
About the works from the Enchanted Voyager series, 2019:
The series “The Enchanted Voyager” takes its title from a novel by Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895), discovered by the artist shortly after the death of his father. The book was found in a suitcase that had been temporarily left with the artist. Life, or death, meant that this suitcase could never be retrieved. Serving as a sort of inheritance and comfort for the imagination, “The Enchanted Voyager” is a dreamed journey, at the edge of the body and the inner worlds it inhabits. It is a drawn ritual carrying reflections on mourning, the legacy of the past, and the loss of collective rites surrounding death.
The exhibition presents a collection of charcoal drawings where the shape of the body and its contours are in metamorphosis. They become landscapes, openings, or a ground in which other worlds take root. In the spirit of a memento mori and the pictorial tradition of vanitas and its still lifes, the representations of bodies coexist with water, forests, flowers, and insects. The images, which seem to both appear and disappear from the surface of the paper, remind us that the journey, like the metamorphosis, is ongoing and does not end here.