Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel exhibition: Verdant Rooms

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce Verdant Rooms, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Evoking a sense of flourishing growth, Verdant Rooms unfolds as a sequence of four interconnected spaces, each environment emerging from the last. Foro Bonaparte’s domestic setting resonates closely with Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s practice, which sees the duo experiment with both artisanal and industrial modes of fabrication to destabilize the very notion of utility, all the while querying humankind’s complex relationship to production and consumption. Each new work is created at the hands of the artists themselves, traversing labor-intensive periods of trial, error and welcome serendipities.

Aligned at the entrance, two solid oak benches with embroidered cushions and carved snails upon their legs seek to bring to the fore an absence of hierarchy between living things. Snails, alongside embroidered cabbages, kohlrabi, potato plants, cabbage butterflies and their caterpillars, earthworms and Colorado beetles demonstrate interspecies coexistence and principles of permaculture, where systems are understood as self-sustaining and mutually supportive.

Works in the second room further this idea: the artists suggest a continuous process of transformation and interdependence across plant, animal and human life. In their solid oak cabinet, pumpkins coexist with human noses, a seemingly arbitrary juxtaposition, which, upon thought, conjures up notions of shape-language. Both can be described as protrusions, rounded volumes, surfaces with texture, and objects organized around inside and outside. A nose projects from a face; a pumpkin projects from the earth as a swollen body. A third bench depicting honey bees, dandelion flowers, mallow flowers, oxeye daisy flowers and snails, upholstered with green linen, incidentally echoes the sage-toned carpet.

Dewar and Gicquel are particularly attentive to the correspondence between the motifs depicted and the labor and materials used to render them. An oak relief representing an apple tart bears witness to this approach: the chisel incises the wood in a parallel gesture to the knife that cuts the fruit.

Similar analogies – or tautologies – are pursued in the large hand-assembled and machine-embroidered quilt installed in the bedroom: the motif of the thread bobbin, placed among a whole ecological complex at work, points back to the very tools of the quilt’s making. The bees, butterflies and insects depicted – diligent, repetitive, and often unnoticed – not only mirror the flitting and rapid strokes of the machine’s needle, but evoke cycles of labor that are both essential and easily overlooked, a form of continuous activity whose visibility the duo playfully seek to restore. In this grid of motifs, no organism has a marginal role, participating instead in complex cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, while contributing to the conditions that sustain the others.

The final room, conceived as a scattered and hallucinated bathroom, brings the exhibition into the most intimate and elemental sphere of domestic life. The presence of hand-modelled toilets, bidets and soap dishes introduces a tension between industrially standardized objects and their artisanal re-fabrication: though potentially functional, they remain suspended as projectional elements within the exhibition context. Rooted in everyday rituals involving water, nudity and vulnerability, the stoneware ceramic forms appear as vessels where fluids circulate, whether the duplicate of a pre-existing sanitary element, smoking pipes or a large-format jar boasting slippery snails atop body fragments. This final space extends the exhibition’s constant comings and goings between seemingly solid and liquid forms, from oak and ceramic to glistening glazes, wet snails and outright references to running water. In this way, Verdant Rooms reinforces the duo’s inkling that all things are interrelated, interdependent and are, to a degree, in constant movement and evolution, depending simply on our angle of perception.

Daniel Dewar (1976, Forest of Dean, UK; lives and works in Brussels) - Grégory Gicquel (1975, Saint-Brieuc, FR; lives and works in Plévenon). Solo exhibitions of their work have been held in institutions such as Z33, Hasselt; MACRO – Museum of Contemporary art, Rome; Culturgest, Lisbon; the Vienna Secession; Kunsthalle Basel; Portikus, Frankfurt; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; KIOSK, Ghent; Musée Rodin, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris.