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XAVIER VEILHAN at Hatfield House in Hatfield
Apr 7 - Sep 30, 2012
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Following on from the success of Moore at Hatfield in 2011, Hatfield House are pleased to be staging the first major UK outdoor exhibition of the sculptural works of French artist Xavier Veilhan. In collaboration with the artist’s studio, Galerie Perrotin and with the support of the Fluxus Foundation, recent key works and especially created site specific pieces will be set throughout the West Garden against the backdrop of the House. The exhibition will run from 7 April to 30 September 2012.
Rooted within the traditions of statuary, Xavier Veilhan builds his work around the same axis: the possibilities of representation and the art of the exhibition. His practice embraces exploration, process and invention as a means to simplicity and abstraction, treating generic objects and shapes of everyday life so that they appear without details, and resistant to any psychological insight.
“My objects seem to have shed details, as if the shapes have been compressed to store them in memory. I try to prefabricate the memory people will have; to give the viewer what he or she will have retranscribed”.
For Veilhan, the art of the exhibition is one of his leitmotifs, the ultimate live performance where works function as part of a greater machinery.
“I have been walking down the lawn to the ancient oaks; the early night was dark so we could see the light from the city of Hatfield glowing in contrast on one side of the sky. I was thinking that I would be happy if my Art could be as impressive as the silhouette of this thousand year old tree. A tree is a visual event, a physical statement and an environment for itself.
Earlier the same day, straight from arriving by the Eurostar, we had tea and then we went for a walk with Lady Salisbury and the dogs. I love the Arboretum with its combination of apparent genuine nature and relative artificiality, since the trees are here like wildness that was sampled by humans. Great Britain is exotic to me, but its relation to nature is the same here and in France, so it makes me feel like home, despite the opposite French and English garden.
I always thought gardens are perfect metaphors for Art exhibitions, an organisation of scattered elements leading to a homogenic space and a coherent experience. When looking at a tree planted by a person who has disappeared a long time ago, a garden also reveals how society interacts with nature. The plant growing here is not just a plant, it is the shadow of our ancestor’s desire he has left behind him”.
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