03 Jun 2009

Jozsa Gallery presents The Frog Princess or Exploring Equations on a Grand Scale

Carte blanche for Olga Kisseleva
In collaboration with the International Art and Science Institute

The exhibition the Frog Princess brings together and confronts the experiences of artists from all sorts of aesthetic worlds, who are interested in applying equally diverse scientific procedures in order to allow for and verify artistic hypotheses. The Frog Princess (Vassilissa the Wise, also called The Astute) represents the beauty of knowledge in Russian culture. Beneath its misleading appearance as an ordinary little frog, lies a beautiful and brilliant young woman in hiding, metaphor for the posture of the artist as marginal researcher, capable of producing marvels with a single gesture.

In recent years, innovative theories such as the quantum theory of gravitation or the theory of cords and its extensions have allowed us to envisage the possibility of describing the world from a whole new point of view. Artists for whom art is none other than another mode of formulating knowledge are close on the heels of scientists, appropriating new perspectives of applications such as: locative media, the question of energy, the electromagnetic field or the consequences of space-time curving.

Is it utopian to unite these two worlds of knowledge: Art and Science? On the contrary, shouldn't it be a welcome way of making any researcher's dream come true, to unify in one and the same space the extreme means capable of explaining the Universe together? Why perpetually oppose art and science under the pretext that some reveal an aesthetic finality and others a logical finality?

The Fog Princess takes us on incursions into ethology (Art Orienté Objet), environmental sciences (Bernard Guelton, Soazic Guezennec), political geography (Carmela Uranga), astrophysics (Florent di Bartolo), the science of language (Igor Antic, Samuel Bianchini), physics (Maria &Natalia Petschatnikov, agronomy (Richard Conte), the physics of fluids (Yann Toma), architecture (Société Réaliste), the political sciences (Olga Kisseleva), the science of information and communication (Natacha Roussel), biotechnology (Orlan), genetic biology (John Cornu), and those who wander freely from one domain to another (Eric Duyckaerts,Pascale Barret…)

If science, when making its laws, insists that man produce concordant conclusions which are not the result of arbitrary conventions or taste or individual interests, then artists can lead us towards a place between reality and fiction, into a world of subjectivity.

These artworks, hybrid objects, reveal the complexity of research and its impact on knowledge. Science is constructed upon evidence against the illusions of immediate understanding. The artists' proposals add enough distance forcing us to question our very existence, with the utmost seriousness, and yet with a smile at the edge of one's mouth. But visitors should rest assured, there lies no sorcery in the artworks presented. There is room left over for the presence of a third element: magic.