In this garden, the paradise
Galerie Umcebo – 102 Bd Diderot 75012 Paris
Photos by Marc Dumas
Opening 25th february 2020
Exhibition until 27th march 2020
Open Thursday to Saturday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
To achieve “In this garden, paradise”, Marc Dumas went regularly, throughout the year 2019, to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
Marc Dumas is not a herbalist or a scientist. If he strolled for a long time in the paths of the garden and scrutinized each botanical setting, it was in search of this “lost nature”, manhandled, locked up, fragmented, become a simple interstice between bitumen and megalopolis.
Rediscovering the Garden of Eden, where we have not seen Eve or Adam for a long time, but from which we can capture a few paradisiacal fragments.
The Deus ex machina camera allows amplification, by choosing a point of view, a framing, or a light (often expected).
By means of an unusual point of view (at ground level) and breathtaking framing where the noise of the city (pedestrians, tourists, etc.) – is eliminated to give way to a peaceful setting, a landscape fleeting and phantasmatic appears. Because subjective vision is confronted with the objective which stabilizes a fragmented look, and which gives shape to a dreamed space: to think of the landscape, reality being only an interior vision, the feeling anticipating reality.
Unable to find the magic link that once united man and nature (which is obviously an impossible mission), Marc becomes rather “the gardener of paradise”, a recurring theme in his photographic work and which finds its origin in his childhood. , where he dreamed of exploring a world unknown to man.
Get away from it all to give shape, decentralize to produce meaning, try to reactivate disappeared nature. Repair the world.
Marc Dumas has previously produced: Voyage around my table, a series presenting objects from his immediate environment whose symbolic significance expresses its relationship with the world; the series Porto da Barra where, live from “the most exceptional city beach in Brazil”, he studies the horizon, the movements of the sea and the regulars; Cargos and Ikaros produced in Salvador; and then the “São Paulo book of all shadows”, produced in collaboration with Lucia Guanaes.
More recently, he produced the SP Cinza and Réburbain series, exhibited at the Umcebo gallery.
His photographic production is visible on www.marcdumas.fr