Gaspard Le Guen

Saenger Galería invites you to the exhibition Dungeness by Gaspard Le Guen.

The Dungeness headland, in the southeast of England, is the only desert in Great Britain. Covered by one of the largest expanses of shingle in Europe, Dungeness is among the most densely populated sites of nautical mythology in the world. It was there that Joseph Conrad (1857, Berdichev—now Ukraine, then Poland – 1924, Bishopsbourne, England) made his home after leaving his life at sea to devote himself to writing.

For several months, immersed in the work and figure of the writer, Gaspard Le Guen (Le Havre, France, 1992), in dialogue with Gabriel Hörner (León, Mexico, 1963), developed a body of work that gradually took the form of a funeral elegy. It revealed itself as one of the outcomes of his previous project, Servicio Nocturno, which evoked the possible lives of a decaying warehouse belonging to a funeral business in Querétaro. In this new phase, the artist becomes a shipwrecked sailor arranging the remnants of the wreck so that they may sing the elegy of the man who perhaps glimpsed—“as a glow makes a fog visible”—the human condition better than anyone else.

Yet Le Guen does not believe in objects; the remains of this shipwreck will only gain meaning at dusk on November 27, during the celebration of the funeral rites for the one who wrote:

“The ethical conception of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions—in which the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even reason seem ready to perish—that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all. I feel strongly that its purpose is purely spectacular—a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you will, but a spectacle nevertheless... never for despair! These visions, delicious or pathetic, are in themselves a moral end... and perhaps the task appointed to us in this world is to pay unceasing and disinterested attention to every phase of the living universe as it is reflected in our consciousness—endowed with speech to bear faithful witness to the visible wonder... to the sublime spectacle.”

— Saenger Galería