Ian Hamilton Finlay, Poursuites révolutionnaires .

The Fondation Cartier presents major works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, born from his interest in the French Revolution. This is the first time such a comprehensive array of his works is being shown to the public. The exhibit title, “Poursuites révolutionnaires” (“Revolutionary Pursuits”), with its double meaning of both continuity and the chase, is expressed visually with the myth of Apollo and Daphne, which the artist transposes in a revolutionary way as a moral introduction to the exhibit.

Finlay transforms the classic allegory of art pursuing nature into Saint-Just – the modern embodiment of Apollo – pursuing the French Republic. Daphne in this case, depicted in a wood color, is virtue, the nature of enlightenment pursued by the Revolution. In another version, she is dressed in camouflage: she is the coveted Republic, terrified by those who yearn for her. Room for a cultivated nature is made by the ferocity of nature left to its own devices, whose principle is conflict, and which corresponds here to the hyperbolic and catastrophic carrying out of the Revolution and the Terror. This relationship between Virtue and Terror, brought together as two sides of the same coin, is the constant subject of the artist’s contemplation. It is this moral complexity that motivates the philosophical walk on which he invites us, by reviving the heroic genre in order to inscribe it into the perspective of societies confronted with terror and terrorism carried out in the name of the ideal – the other side they cannot separate themselves from.