As the title was proposed by Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil, I sought reason and prayer, a matter to celebrate the nocturnal star and those who accompany it in its mysterious wanders. Walk explorers, migrants, migrators, people of the night and always, running every day after life or survival. “Exoders” I would dare to say, while contemplating the large bas-relief that our duo of artists has carved, not in stone but in resin, echoing the human figures who have been advancing for centuries on the tympanum of the abbey of Vézelay and many facades still dressing our cathedrals. Even closer to us, perhaps we shall see in the object of such crossing a simple and beautiful tribute to the wanderings so dear to Rimbaud, at the heart of Illuminations.

In any case, there is no biblical resurgence in here. Not even the convolutions of some literary contours. The form, or rather the forms are here to serve the discourse of a real crisis of conscience while facing climate change, already pushing all species to move seeking for a better elsewhere. Somewhat of a procession, like the one that Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil already implemented in the summer of 2023 in Châteauvert, and which they have decided to share with us today the video capture, unique and singular animation of an exhibition where the action appears deliberately still. A journey that is inscribed in the place, where it imposes itself forcing us to move and question ourselves on this path of faith, each work dialoguing with the others as much as with ourselves. There is an urge to see as there is an urge to believe. Suddenly, the mechanics seem slowed down or stopped, and instilled in the nature that our two companions have accustomed us to robotize and set to music, before offering it to us, poetically augmented. Perhaps because the subject is particularly sensitive to them, throughout the uncertain post-pandemic times, prelude to an apocalypse from afar, and day by day announced, denounced, amplified… Or perhaps simply because their gaze is focused on what remains for us to draw tomorrow, an archaeology of a future more than ever idealized, like a world after the world.

The situation is serious: that’s what they seem to tell us through the lightness of their art and with their usual nonchalance, and it is easy to observe that their latest works here are unusually charged with the weight of a certain humanity. Silhouettes are drawn, appear and disappear, wrapped as if half-hidden in an ocean of clouds. Major changes are announced, birds accompany them like augurs in a rather heavy sky. The incarnation is palpable even in the sculptures that literally inhabit the space, imaginary and uncertain forms, whose morphology remains mysterious to us. Outgrowths of life, masks or effigies, shelters or nests, the world today seems to have been paralleled, for Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil. The beings or species are probably not so far away that they once occupied them, or will they invest them again tomorrow? The notion of time is fluid, and, as per usual in their work, strangely escapes us to lose itself in the timelessness of forms, ready to activate. Are these fragments of past centuries, or futuristic refuges from an almost organic imagination, which would play with our reality? Certainly nature is damaged, but it is not up to them, right now, to repair it: more certainly to reinvent it through a multitude of objects and sculptures whose use appears foreign to us, but could obviously be the one we imagine being able to attribute to them. To each our little planet, but it is nevertheless the same, shared one by all of us. Unique and fragile, universal because indeed mortal.

Déplacer la Lune (Moving the moon)… it sounds hectic. But the image is the amount of the upheavals and changes currently taking place on our earth, perhaps even in our sky. It is an ornamental as well as metonymic journey that Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil invite us through. A slow stroll that offers a new perspective on the curiosity and acuity of a series of works designed here especially for their first Parisian exhibition. And behind this quest for the sensitive, the question posed of the role that our species has at the heart of the living, a way for them to order us that it is more than urgent for us to act!

– Jean-Marc Dimanche