- Exhibition
Vous êtes un arbre ! – Deauville (France)
You are a tree!
There are billions of trees on Earth. They are said to be part of the solution to fight the climate crisis. They surround us, protect us. We love them, we venerate them. Those plant species that reach out, vertically, to the skies and that keep our planet together, are just like us. There is tree in humans, just like there is human in trees.
Could this be why they have fascinated us for thousands of years? 15th-century exploring botanists marvelled at them and compiled a quite stupefying inventory. Since the Middle Ages, scientists have striven to describe and to classify them. In the 19th century, artists engaged in encounters with them, as if visiting a friend in the depths of Fontainebleau Forest. Some called upon their personalities to invent modern landscapes. Others drew inspiration from the random route of their branches to approach abstraction. As if the tree thought inside of us, through us and with us, its many representations. Contemporary artists, sometimes in association with scientists, glorify such proximity. The themed trail of this exhibition offers a journey, from the Middle Ages to the present day, through the world of trees, via images, produced by science or by artists.
