Jardim Cinema

    “A garden can, alas, be a place of refuge, but also, particularly in these times of natural destruction, a place of resistance, in cities and elsewhere, a site of and for poetry. There is a lot to be learned from Nature about resisting, if you can bring up the patience to apprehend it. Thus, this work is a manifesto not to be in the garden, but to be the garden.” — Daniel Blaufuks

    With Jardim Cinema, Daniel Blaufuks (b. 1963 in Lisbon, lives in Portugal) presents new works which, starting from the artist’s own garden, suggest how gardens can teach us ways to navigate through time and space. Located near Lisbon, Blaufuks' garden surrounds a house built by his grandparents, who found refuge in Portugal after fleeing 1930s Germany. Through a group of collages on A4 paper, combining various elements such as instant and family photographs, texts, documents, and plants—a format dear to the artist and present in previous projects such as Attempting Exhaustion (2009-ongoing) and The Days Are Numbered (2018-ongoing)—Blaufuks tells the story of his family’s experience of major historical events. This reminds us that the artist has a strong predilection for the intersection between private and public memory. Once again multiplying literary references, Blaufuks offers direct observations and thoughts, framed on the gallery walls, which seem to counterbalance the innocence initially suggested in the artist’s new film Jardim Cinema.

    In numerous sequences, Blaufuks pays meticulous attention to life in his garden. “If you have this love for what is humble,” says Rainer Maria Rilke in the prologue. Jardim Cinema also includes an excerpt from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a movie directed by Vittorio De Sica and adapted from Giorgio Bassani’s 1962 novel of the same name. In the context of 1930s fascist and antisemitic Italy, a group of beautiful teenagers, all dressed in white, are cycling—not toward the tennis court, but toward the concentration camp. Illusions surrounding death were already central to Blaufuks’ Terezin (2006-2016), a vast project which focused on Nazi propaganda around Theresienstadt camp used to deceive the Allies. This warning is echoed throughout the film by the original music composed by Marco Franco, in which the piano, dancing among high notes like butterflies, never seems able to free itself from dissonant chords. This reminds us that considering the garden as a refuge implies a monstrous threat coming from outside—or perhaps from inside—a metaphor for our own times.

    Jardim Cinema was also the name of a legendary movie theater inaugurated in Lisbon in the early 1930s. Closed in the late 1970s, the building now houses a bazaar selling cheap goods. Its fate illustrates the recent changes Portugal has endured, while its original name—promoting outdoor movie projections—subtly articulates a contradictory experience: the quietness of a garden and the eventfulness of a movie. This serves as a metaphor for a possible relationship to the world, balanced between meditation and action.

— Jean-Kenta Gauthier, October 2024


    Daniel Blaufuks, Jardim Cinema is the second part of Avant-Gardens, a season of gallery exhibitions emanating from artists' gardens, in homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), a poet and conceptual artist who liked to define himself as an “avant-gardener.”


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Avant-Gardens
September 7 - December 21
Jean-Kenta Gauthier Odéon & Vaugirard

Part 1: David Horvitz, Avenues All Lined With Trees
September 7 - October 19
JKG Odéon & Vaugirard

Part 2: Daniel Blaufuks, Jardim Cinema
October 26 - December 21
JKG Vaugirard

Part 3: Hanako Murakami, Sufficiently Near
October 30 - December 21
JKG Odéon