Paul-Armand Gette


 

Ambra Polidori
"Paul-Armand Gette"
Lapiz, Madrid, n°58

(version anglaise)

Paul-Armand Gette is in many ways like the Dadaists, but his style is completely his own. This Frenchman, born in Lyon in 1927, sets ont to attack the ideological autonomy of art. He uses scientific nonenclalure to show the subjective elements and the poetic capacity of science at the same time as he evinces a secret pleasure in questioning and treating ironically the claims to truth that are taken too seriously.
His photographs, drawings, sculptural installation and sketches now on view at the Magasin, the National Centre of Contemporary Art at Grenoble, are representative of his body of work between 1960 and 1988 and show the developement of his personal style of blending art and science, with particular references to entomology, botany and geology.
Gette enjoys finding out how far he can go and then pushing himself to the limits. Although with results that are somewhat clinical, he makes himself quite clear: he seeks to undermine the rules and norms that govern our cultural customs and perceptions.
A tour of the exhibition reveals the bonds winch exist between the Frenchman and botanists, writers and artists and which indicate the sources of his work.
Gette is clearly influenced by Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's adventures in Wonderland, and his talent for nonsense. He shares with Carroll and attraction to little girls.
This trend in his work began to be seen in the Seventies and was evidently intended to be provocative. He sees his subject with the eye that seeks to break down prohibition s and taboos; like the fetishist eye that sees what it wants to see.
Gette likes the double meaning but eschews logical-mathematical formalism; he varies the scales (as happens in Alice) and juggles with the transparent and the distorted image. But at the same time he finds common ground with the Swedish naturalist Linneo to whom he paid tribute in 1975 in The Binary Nomenclature and in his photographs of plants and botanical gardens portrayed with irony and seen as an allegory of the bourgeois ideal of Nature. With his showing of these uninteresting pictures and his exotic and banal notes, Gette questions with only the total truthfullness of science, but also what we understand conventonally as art.
In like manner he pays homage to Claude Monet, making repeated use in his work of water lilies (nymphea) with an erotic appeal. The flower linked to the word nymphe (nymph from the woods -fairy-young girl or the inner lips of the vulva). All of this enables him to create visual images full of double meaning.
Gette's installation titled The Wait of the Nymphs (1988) is displayed in the last exhibition hall of the Magasin. It consists of three large blocks of glowing volcanic rock placed in front of a fixed picture of rose petals on a video screen with the aim of creating a metaphor of desire.
Solidification (1988) is the name Gette gives to his work commemorating the bicentenary of the French revolution. The artist, who always begins with metaphor, invites us, ironically, to reflect on the relations hip that exists between France and its revolution.