I Never Promised You A Stone Garden

Fondation Fiminco
Exhibition from March 20 to 26, 2023

I Never promised You A Stone Garden

Artists – Véronique Devoldère – Didier Clain

Curator – Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge

During this week of Drawing Now, Véronique Devoldère and Didier Clain, visual artists, propose performative workshops around drawing.

With the support of the Fondation Fiminco, the Paris College of Art, the Printemps du Dessin, and the curatorship of Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge, I Never Promised You a Stone Garden is a work that questions drawing and its new challenges. From the obsessions of the gesture, drawing, erasing, repeating, fragmenting, taking, organizing, opposing, to the revelation of another garden, the spectators are invited to participate in its workshops and to dialogue with the drawings. During the workshops, the newly created drawings activate the performance in resonance with the works created in collaboration for this event.

Devoldère and Clain explore a field of cultural dichotomies in that different garden traditions in the West and East operate on opposite principles. In the ornamental and geometric order of the West, the legitimization of dominance is manifested, while the Japanese garden always puts the visitor in motion, allowing him to appreciate the view through a change of perspective. The stones are in this dialogue of ideas, material and sign-object. The exhibition becomes an installation that connects these divergent lines in space in order to bring them together in a discourse.