Intriguing, powerful, beautiful and cruel

If, in the Middle Ages, the animals which live under ground were considered diabolic, the others were recognized as equal to humans so much so that one wonders about the existence of their heart. Many trusted the scales of Aristotle, suspecting that the animals, just like the men, were holders of a vegetative, sensitive, and intellectiual heart. This is why certain animals, known as "criminal", experienced judgement, lawsuit, hanging and quatering. Escaping from original sin, they could not however know the torments of the heart. For Descartes, like the scientist of today, affirmed that the animal was only one "mechanical machine". Since then, animals have come to haunt literature with the "Fables" of Fontaine (books VII and XI), "Animal Farm" by George Orwell. In short, the animal haunts us and is savagely liked, fairy tales and the comic strips illustrate it, just as the cinema of animation, whose techniques have been adopted by Delphine Gigoux-Martin in a recent installation. "I live in dog, I am a true artist, and I think that it is necessary to approach the animal" proclaims famous Russian "agitationnist", Oleg Kulik. Other artists, Chinese, differently tackle this subject, the inflated horse of Peng Yu and Yang Maoyuan, or the strange gull of Xiao Yu floating in formol. The British Damien Hirst cuts a pregnant cow in half and exhibits it in an aquarium of formaldihide, while the Italian Maurizio Cattelan naturalizes a male ostrich whose head hides in the ground. The German Thomas Grunfeld imagines as for him multiple hybrid combinations of animal species like a rabbit equipped with duck legs. The installation of Delphine Gigoux-Martin implies the animal like subject and the taxidermy like means. Here, it is the animal under its postmodern condition which returns to the mirror of the human animality. The chick is recognized by us soft, and innocent, and the yellow of its duveteux plumage is so luminous that one names it so; yellow chick. It is this small inoffensive being, "light as the wadding" writes Maupassant, that one finds here in the installation coldly put in scene. Is it necessary for as much pretending to be unaware of the conditions of the intensive breeding from where these small bodies come? Is it necessary to hide the fate of millions of its species? Piled up ones on the others, their beak is sometimes burned at the end so that they do not damage their neighbors. There, a metal stem is fixed in this nozzle, and the chick is planted right to the wall, like a dart. Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, writer of macabre tales and destroyer of religion, will definitively mark the conceptrice of this work. This American would have disappeared mysteriously at the 71 years old on a battle field, engaged at this modest age at Pancho Villa. Previously, it would have had some intuitions on the definition of the word "witch", such this artist clermontoise acting as Auvergne less than one century after "Beautiful and attracting young person, whose perverse activities exceed the devil". But, if none like to nourish crusty news, for as much "One always does not eat what is on the table". It is precisely the heading of the work by Delphine Gigoux-Martin, borrowed from the author of the "Dictionary of the devil". According to many traditions, the man would be the guardians of creation. One and the other would be bound by a deep mutual cohesion. The Canadian scenario writer David Cronenberg entrusted in a maintenance which the man was only one animal, and which there was a truth hard to bear. This dedication "of human" is not indebted, it is certain, that with ourselves, i.e. with the first predator on the scale of the animal kingdom. Where would be man without his small cruelties, and where would be, for a number among us, a good dinner without a gilded poultry thigh. Decidely, modern thought is too complicated, I prefer that of the artist or the animal... This mutual cohesion, this universal and moral collective field are somewhat put at evil. Intrigante, powerful, beautiful and cruel, the work exists without pretences, targeting neither good nor bad.
 Frederic Bouglé, 2007