Anne and Patrick Poirier

In a never-before-seen series of around fifteen photographs of exotic flowers and plants selected from the château’s greenhouse and portrayed in colour on porcelain, Anne and Patrick Poirier create a portrait of nature that, at first glance is pleasant to look at, but bears an underlying criticism of the unnatural misappropriation of its beauty. A second collection of six colourful new paintings combining tempera and lithography techniques, features depictions of well-known flowers (tulips, pansies, snapdragons, etc.) that have been industrially grown since the 1970s. Together, they form a vision of the beauty of a nature under threat from a consumerism that is disrupting the balance of both the natural world and humanity. This portrayal of a dominated natural environment contradicts the view of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an English philosopher, scientist and statesman who believed that “to be commanded, nature must first be obeyed”. In a deliberate reference, the artists have woven this maxim into a long, narrow rug made from wool, silk and bamboo fibres. It bears a resemblance to a second rug featuring the cry of warning from Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), an American naturalist, philosopher and poet who is now considered as being the father of ecology “Talk of heaven! Ye disgrace earth”. Anne and Patrick Poirier have created a sort of replica of a garden from nature that reflects the beauty of the Historic Grounds, while alluding to multiple interpretations centred around memory, a topic that Mary Carruthers quite remarkably described in her book The Craft of Thought: mediation, rhetoric and the making of images. She quotes Italian historian and philosopher from the 13^th century, Boncompagno da Signa. “He declares that thought is a tool that people use to understand time, that allows us to remember the past, embrace the present and contemplate the future by comparing it to the past.”

In the Footbath, the artists have installed Mundo Perdido (1983-2020), which is a collection of three bronze architectural models with gold leaf gilding inspired by Tikal in Guatemala.

Anne Poirier was born on 31 March 1941 in Marseilles and Patrick Poirier on 5 May 1942 in Nantes. They now live at Lourmarin in Vaucluse. After studying at the Paris Decorative Arts School, they were resident artists at the Villa Médicis from 1967 to 1972. Right from the start of their time there, they decided to work together and to pool their ideas and sensitivities.

Anne and Patrick Poirier are true travellers through memory, which they consider to be the basis of all intelligence between human beings and societies. They explore sites and remains from ancient Greek, Roman, Mayan and Indian civilisations and bring them back to life through models and reduced scale reconstitutions.  They are sculptors, architects and archaeologists, all at the same time. They are interested in the psyche and continuously strive to understand its structures through a variety of metaphors.

Using mythological tales as an inspiration and by exploring real or imaginary cities, the work they create together is a metaphor for time and memory. Past and future are closely intertwined, giving us a picture of the fragility of cultures and human beings.

In France, they are represented by the Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, and in Italy by the Galleria Fumagalli in Milan, as well as the Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna.