Élisée, a biography

Élisée is Élisée Reclus, the libertarian geographer, the visionary writer, the travelling anarchist, the Communard pedagogue. He wrote all his life the singular to speak of the other, of all the others, of the universal. His life was written by walking, traveling a lot, nurturing many friendships around the world, with scholars and poets alike. It was rich, dense, filled with images and notes, maps and books, diffuse and concentrated thoughts. Nature plays a major role in it, because that's where it all starts. By observing it carefully and intuitively, Reclus undertook to study it and by the same all those who inhabit and shape it. In his work, it appears as a living and social reality, a profoundly original vision at the end of the 19th century.

More than a century after his death, in 1905, Florentine and Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize, draftsmen, painters, ceramists and sculptors, built a prolific work that tends to constitute, fragment after fragment, a large and multiple world in which forms and styles coexist in harmony. Because their art was born from encounter, it has never ceased to be turned towards others. They regularly engage in new collaborations with artists and craftsmen with specific know-how. They claim a filiation to the Arts and Crafts movement, founded by William Morris, contemporary and friend of Élisée Reclus, militant for the reconciliation of the so-called minor arts and the so-called intellectual arts. Art, work merge into life. Florentine and Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize thus produce lamps, seats, plates, vases as well as drawings and canvases on the scale of the servant. In the same spirit, their exhibitions are spaces to live, to experience more than to contemplate. They draw the world as Élisée Reclus intended to make us know: teeming with details, colors, sensitive impressions superimposed on precise descriptions of pieces of nature.

The exhibition Élisée, a biography, aims to reconstruct a concentrate of landscape, reconciling the absolute and the fragment. The floor, the walls, the ceiling are invested. The visitor is surrounded everywhere by flowers, the sky, mountains, streams, trees. They are drawn, painted, screen printed, printed. Ceramic seats, as well as cork and felt from a collaboration with designer Romain Guillet, punctuate the course as many spaces and potential rest times. The visitor is invited to stop, observe the landscape that presents itself to him, but also to read or dream about anything else. This immersive experience is reminiscent of the geographer's ultimate project for the 1900 Universal Exhibition: a terrestrial globe nearly 200 meters in diameter, in which continents and oceans would have been reproduced on a scale of 1:100,000. "We will thus witness all the manifestations of life on earth, whose expanses we will look at. We will see it come alive, transform and harmony will be made in our imagination between the earth, its phenomena of all kinds, its plants and its inhabitants."
This imagination that acts at the heart of any artistic experience is more solicited here than ever. It brings together, it brings together what is separated. Elisha, a biography, is one of those worlds in motion, its abundance introduces an inexhaustible freedom of connections.