A Modern Nature follows on from the exhibition devoted to Derek Jarman (1942-1994) that the Crédac presented in 2021. Its ambition was to shed light on the connections between the different facets of his artistic practice, including gardening, which played a decisive role in the last years of his life.
In his diary, which he entitled Modern Nature, the British artist recounts how the garden he cultivated at Dungeness in the southeast of England became an essential place of life, hope, and resistance in the face of AIDS, which he was living with. This act of faith and hope has inspired the present exhibition, bringing together artists who develop resilient gestures in a world marked by multiple crises, and who draw our attention to threatened forms of fragility. In the artistic field, this broadened vision of environmental ecology is neither reduced to a discourse nor to a motif. The exhibition is nourished by the fertile ground of the relationships woven over time between artists and the Crédac.
Their works enter into dialogue with Derek Jarman's garden of "healing colours." For, as artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) said of his long-term garden-work Little Sparta in Scotland, "Some gardens are described as retreats when in fact they are assaults."