Untitled work imprinted with natural manhole rust on paper Drawing

Daniel Mourre shows the excesses of human societies and the need for rapid change to avoid the inevitable outbreak of extreme situations, and to confront the programmed finitude of Man caused by a damaged nature. To represent man's impact on his environment, Daniel Mourre has created the propagations and impregnations series, following the example of César and his compressions and expansions series. In contrast to Christo, who packed his works to show them, Daniel Mourre unwraps a manhole cover placed on a canvas stamped with his rusty imprint to show its absence. To do this, the artist positions himself as an archaeologist of the very distant future, discovering traces and fossils of the Anthropocene era. The manhole, which the artist sees as a symbol of industrial human civilization, is thus explored through a variety of techniques. By virtue of its antinomy, the object serves to highlight the extremes observed in our society. The consequence is the appearance of rust resulting from the destruction of metal, the foundation of our contemporary society. His works can be seen as the fossilized imprints of an industrial era that has lost its meaning and destroyed itself. In their total contemporaneity, the pieces he presents are a kind of reminder of primitive art, a new, post-collapse primitive art. He calls this concept: FINITISM. The public is drawn in by the aesthetics of the works, which are equal to the blackness of the observation; when visitors linger on the technique employed, the absolute coherence of the whole imposes itself on them. Below is an excerpt from a report in the contemporary art magazine "ARTENSION" N°179, May/June 2023, written by Christian NOORBERGEN and entitled "Daniel Mourre Infinite finitude". "Daniel Mourre dares to imagine the end of humanity. Could he be the first creator of a movement destined to shake up all the world's inertia - THE FINITISM, uncertain, unprecedented and committed? It could be! And his incandescent art feeds on this prodigious challenge: how to survive one's own end? For him, "the manhole becomes an allegory of man". But does man still exist in the wounded heart of humanity's torments?"