Triangular Memory Exhibition by French artists Marie de la Ville Baugé, Laure Debrosse, and Emmanuelle Sacchet. March 2018, St. Petersburg Art Residency, 2,04 gallery, Pushkinskaya-10 art centre, Saint Petersburg.
“This feeling stems from the fragility of our nature, from a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the rapidity of our existence.” Meltzer
Many 18th and 19th century intellectuals, such as Wordsworth, Diderot and Goethe, found a melancholic pleasure in contemplating the ruin as dystopia. These broken buildings drew the romantic imagination as evidence of the triumph of nature over culture.
The images and testimonies on «Красный треугольник », the red Triagolnik of St Petersburg, presented by Marie de la Ville Baugé, Laure Debrosse, and Emmanuelle Sacchet are evidence of nature reclaiming the manmade world, visions of this poignant, strangely expressive and near mute space. Through their works, artefacts of history are at once fresh and new, ancient and decayed. The past and present cohabitate in this forsaken and ruined space and the artists make us question — Who are the people working here? What are their stories?
These three artists have gathered evidence of a decaying past that fuels modern imagination. Empty rooms start a new life of their own away from the world. Flickers of movements and industrial activities animate the space, and what used to be taken care of, left to disappear, slowly comes back to life as ruined aesthetics, melancholic paintings of a past we long for.