Like an exquisite corpse, Roger Ballen - a major photographer on the international scene - and Hans Lemmen, a designer masterfully inspired by the challenges linked to representations of nature, engage in the disturbing game of artistic coupling, pushing each artist to integrate the approach of the other. Stimulating strain which, beyond the plastic game and the awakening of formal resonances, reveals a deep affinity between their two artistic universes.

© Hans Lemmen and Roger Ballen

Between Roger Ballen and Hans Lemmen there is an obvious community of imagination, blurring the distance between them. In the Netherlands, Hans Lemmen tears apart Roger Ballen's photographs. He completes the fragments thus obtained or inserts them into graphic compositions. Thousands of miles away, Roger Ballen uses certain drawings by Hans Lemmen which he integrates into installations intended in turn to be photographed.

Since his installation in South Africa, Ballen has explored the troubled margins of humanity, where, in a context of extreme precariousness, only occupied with surviving, men have neither the capacity nor the vanity to want to escape the nature. This indefinition is reflected in particular in their extreme proximity, their proximity to animals.

Yet Roger Ballen does not stick to this political interpretation. In the manner of Samuel Beckett whose approach he claims, his work has a universal scope. His images express the absurdity of the human condition. The manifesto is also coupled with psychological investigation work. The images of those left behind who pose in front of the camera are as many self-portraits as if, in their destitution, Ballen's models handed him a mirror reflecting his own gray areas. They explore the disturbing and uncertain morphology of his psyche.

In a cultural and social context very different from that of the African continent, Hans Lemmen explores in his own way the imaginary territory where man and animal mix. In his graphic work, as in his work as a sculptor, the artist pursues a tireless quest for origins.

Passionate from his childhood about the imprint that our prehistoric ancestors left on the ground, he retains nostalgia for a time when man did not live outside of nature. At the whim of a certain artistic primitivism, he denounces the suffering of the earth and living species abused by modernity.

The exhibition of the Hunting and Nature Museum allows you to follow the creative processes of the two artists. The artists themselves, represented by two life-size seated figures with animal eyes, welcome visitors through an installation made with four hands. They are seated in the first room, accompanied by their pets and surrounded by a contemporary wall painting: a drawing that runs through the four walls and the floor of the room. The second part of the exhibition, devoted to personal and individual works, precedes the original graphic works born from the collaboration between Ballen and Lemmen, on the principle of mutual inclusion and borrowing. To conclude the exhibition, a video documents the production of these works very foreign to their respective practices, demonstrating to what extent art feeds on constraints such as that which has been defined here.

This exhibition, co-produced by the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, will be presented there in 2018.

Pratical information

Commissioner: Claude d'Anthenaise and Jan-Philipp Fruehsorge

Museum of Hunting and Nature
62, rue des Archives 75003 Paris

The museum is open every day except Monday and public holidays, from 11 a.m. to 18 p.m., from 11 a.m. to 21:30 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Full price : $8
Reduced price : $6

To know more : www.chassenature.org