DUMONTEIL Contemporary is pleased to present Vertige (Vertigo), a group show in the continuity of its artistic program, in which each year the gallery presents an exhibition focusing on a particular color. After blue and pink, this year is dedicated to GREEN.

Green is the color our eyes perceive the most shades of. When humans were hunter-gatherers, this trait allowed them to discern predators amidst the dense foliage of humid forests. Green obviously brings to mind Nature. Vegetation, as well as the animal world, are associated with this color.

Green indicates a positive, clean, protective power. In a way, it symbolizes what humans believe in today, the place where the invisible, the magical, the religious manifest.

Westerners, lacking traditional spirituality, are deserting churches and turning to Nature as to a fragile God that must be protected from themselves. The notion of green living, of green energy, suggests exemplary behavior that leaves no harmful trace on Earth and symbolizes, in a way, a new form of sanctity.

Green is no longer just a color; it is the symbol of a struggle to defend the natural world and protect the heritage of future generations. This is an extremely heavy burden on our contemporaries, that of turning back and saving the world from an industrial system that has crushed our resources and without which we do not know how to live today.

We are overwhelmed by the very anxious feeling that we are responsible for a vertiginous fall that will leave us without water, without air, and without resources unless there is a sudden and immediate 180° turn. Breathless, we move forward blindly, attempting seemingly in vain to save what we can and plug the leaks on a Titanic planet adrift.

The exhibition Vertige offers a parenthesis, a moment of symbiosis between Man and Nature, without guilt, without fatality... A world where the infinitely large, the sky, and the auroras borealis meet the microscopic organisms nestled in forest lichens. Vertige proposes a world where the human being is a bridge for the living and a sanctuary for Nature.

Recreating a contemporary mythology, the exhibition aims to be an initiatory journey in an enchanted forest where one can easily encounter will-o'-the-wisps, nymphs, and minotaurs. The stone guardians by Léo Nataf watch over the balance of this micro-universe. Basile Boon's ceramics take us into an enchanted world where Cinderella's carriage and the she-wolf of Remus and Romulus meet without anachronism. Andrew Erdos's glass lanterns guide the visitor in an increasingly introspective immersive journey.

The encounter is meant to be spiritual, beginning literally and figuratively with Alice Grenier Nebout and her mythological frescoes, gradually becoming metaphysical and contemplative in the eyes of Marion Artense Gély, whose successive glazes create paintings that can layer up to 150 coats of paint and recall satellite images captured deep in the galaxy.

Vertige is a baptism, a communion, akin to Jennifer Westjohn's photograph showing in a mirror the immersion of a man in green and luminous water. Vertige connects the immense to the minuscule, the positive to the negative, the pagan to the sacred, using humans as a hyphen between heaven and earth.