Galerie Lara Vincy.

The Galerie Lara Vincy is showing the fifth solo exhibition by Aurèle :

“Since the Amoco Cadiz by way of Exxon Valdez and the deforestation of Amazonia, the lost dog has always tried to draw attention to the imminence of an ecological disaster. The times have caught up with me. Therefore, the lost dog no longer has any reason to bark and to call out against the danger : it can only act in order to improve the city and contribute to a better way of life. Thus, with the help of Chinese agronomical engineers, we have managed to develop the experiment of the LostDogCo2, who guarded the French pavilion’s atrium during last year’s universal exhibition in Shanghai.
As an artist and world citizen, my work has a part to play within the social and political field, or else it is pointless. Like every other man, I am responsible for what is happening to-day, and by means of my work, I have an opportunity to gather up an audience, to lend weight to things. My duty therefore is to provide example through action. Thus, I got the idea of turning inside out the camouflage motif in order to produce the CamouDog that must be viewed as the battle-dress of a new army gathering up people ready to change the world, or at least to contribute to it.”

Aurèle, July 2011


The LostDog after Fukushima. When Aurèle turns green…

Twenty-five years ago, Aurèle discovered in the streets of New York, a search notice for a lost dog, with the palindromic name : Bob. While at it, the artist paid homage to Yves Klein’s legendary blue by taking over the color of the sun. Thus came into being Bob The LostDog, « a spokesman for man lost in the meanders of the modern world» and chrome yellow n°2, christened International Aurèle Yellow, a mental image of urgency and of hope for its creator. A dual birth that a chronological happenstance made coincide strangely, in 1986, with one of the major ecological catastrophes of the end of the 20th century : Chernobyl. Bob irradiated, the Aurèle yellow combined with the Klein blue : the green mutation of the LostDog was under way. In 2010, the LostDogCo2, a gigantic vegetal sculpture shown in the Universal Exhibition in Shanghai, took part in the awakening of the urban ecological consciousness-raising : Better City Better life, the exhibition’s theme, then rang out like a kind of joyful Yes we can, like the promise of a better future. Then there came Fukushima…
Singing in the rain is a summing-up exhibition that invites us, through the visual figure of the lost dog to query the ecological and human peril that awaits the world. Like an impassive sphinx under an acid rain, The LostDog after Fukushima, spray bombed and seeming to have come straight out of a radioactive earth, faces us and asks: “What have we done in the past twenty years ?” and what can art do when faced with contemporary problems apart from “weeping glittering tears ” ?

Déborah Boltz

Translated in English by Ann Cremin.