"Shelter NPC 104" - Limited Edition 1 of 15 Photograph

TO OUR WILD CHILDHOOD_ Hélène Fresnel, associate professor, art critic BEHIND THE LEAVES THE WORLD Artist Pascal Demeester combs through Europe and the United States to help us rediscover the forest through spectacular photographs, drawings and sculptures. Archaic constructs of shelters, striking angles framed through interwoven trees, drawings setting a woodland scene - original works by this artist aren’t only an homage to nature’s precious and uncertain resources, they are an experience, a proposition to every one. Let’s embark on a search for the wild child - let’s reconnect with the wild child within, that we once were or could have been! Crouched on a forest’s edge, observe the world through branches, visualize what our refuge could look like. The power of Demeester’s work is anchored in this implicit invitation and presents itself as an adventure of aesthetics, symbolism, originality and mystery, and all connect to the personal and universal. IMMERSION IN THE HEART OF A PERSONAL ORIGINAL ADVENTURE. A SHARE OF THE CHILDHOOD IN EACH OF US. This experience resembles an original adventure that deeply and continuously questions us. As such, the forest of Pascal Demeester shelters the ‘infans’ that we once were, the child before speech, before civilization. Psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis defines [infans] as “one who taps into all ranges of sensations, images, confused yet mysterious perceptions...one that has not been dominated by language.” The photographs makes us feel that child which understands the world as an animal and views a domesticated exterior as irreconcilably distant and foreign. A FOREST SOMEWHERE IN OUR MEMORY The mist and blur reaffirm this situation, shrouding the forest clearing with a dream-like veil that transforms a horse into a ghostly apparition. The choice of using black and white also plays a role in that it facilitates a journey into memory. Tarkovski, through his filmography, suggests that memories don’t always retain colors. In this regard, Demeester’s work seems to tie in with the Russian filmmaker in that it allows us to relive original memories. THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD ? The hole-shaped framing even manages to place us, as observers, in a womb-like state, lodged in the deepest nooks of our forest mother. The pointed exterior doesn’t appear any less than a “concerning oddity.” What is familiar becomes a sudden cause of anxiety - to paraphrase a Freudian expression.