Modern-Day Contemporaries

Cardboard forest by Eva Jospin.

Hellooo everyone,

So this week I've been researching at the diverse range of contemporary art that The National Art Society show on their Facebook page. For those that already know me, I easily dismiss anything that comes into conversation with 'Contemporary art' because if your a museum/ art gallery regular like me, your used to seeing colour block monochrome canvasses and the usual pointless alien-like dot in the middle of a blank canvas in the likes of the Tate whereas you get the more traditional and meaningful paintings in art galleries in Manchester and The Walker (Liverpool's Baltic Triangle).

But now, my tastes in contemporary art have developed, engaging in 'meaningful' 'interesting' pieces of work that artists today have brought out. So in this post (and a few others) I'm not going to ramble on about what I think should be considered as art, instead I'm going to introduce you to a few modern day contemporaries that I discovered this week!

Cardboard Forest by Eva Jospin (Above) was one of the installations I found fascinating. Personally I love trees and to just see the intricacy and detail and time she's put into this makes me interested in finding out more about her work. 

Graduate of the Beaux-Arts Academy in Paris, Eva Jospin has been dedicating herself for several years to the question of the landscape and its representation. More recently, the artist, through a unique medium, the cardboard, sculpts large “Forest”.

The correlations between this material and the represented subject, are both logical and conflicting. Eva Jospin explains that she  approaches the cardboard on its oppositions. This raw, surly support and of fragile appearance, is going to be mastered, tamed, as ennobled for, in the term of this creative process, to ( re ) become a tree and to embody so the solidity of a trunk as the delicate complexities of a forest. 
That is why Dominique Païni wrote about this work:" Eva Jospin forgets nothing of the stake which is lying at the bottom of these undergrowth, foliage and clearings: restore an unlimited mess, exceed by the virtuosity of the lifting and the cut the illusions of the depth, experiment the limits of a frame and a surface to deceive the eye. "

For her first personal exhibition in France, the artist, who conceives her works as a space of projection, declines the forms and the density of forests, and investigates the inexhaustible poetic imagination which they arouse.
The big Forest shown at the Galerie Pièce Unique occupies a large part of the space, it embraces literally the vision of the spectator. In a glance, the magic of the work operates. Almost in spite of him, the passer-by is snatched by the power suggestive of this natural element; the more the eyes dive into the strata of boughs and foliages, and the more his spirit gets lost. Because, indeed, to take back here again Dominique Païni's words: " get lost: is not it the only danger which becomes attached to this natural labyrinth that is a forest?"  
Every night, the sculpture will be differently perceived thanks to a progressive lighting.
In the Galerie Pièce Unique Variations, Eva Jospin varies the scales and perturbs our sensations. There, another vast forest, exhibited separately in a room, brings us to observe the variety of these  monochrome plants, and to feel the peculiarity of their suggestive strength.
In the rest of the space, Eva Jospin presents for the first time small formats, for her "contrary to the big forests which create an effect of depth and a sensation of  loss of marks , these works plunge us in the heart of a plant profusion  details of which possess the precision of a giant herbarium".

Check out this website: http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/105806-eva-jospin