Daniel Dezeuze’s “Mesoamerica” is a personal reflection inspired by his travels in Mexico and Mayan architecture. In the mid-sixties, the young Dezeuze spent his first year in Mexico, which had a profound influence on him.

His latest ‘tableaux’, wall assemblages made from scraps of painted wood, recall this seminal experience of the jungle and vanished civilisations. On the ground floor of the exhibition, around a ‘negotiating table’, there is an installation of ‘weapons’, ‘table guns’ and other ‘shields’, evoking the tensions between nature and culture, ‘indigenous’ peoples and colonisers. The simplicity of the materials chosen – wood, wire mesh, corks – and the delicacy of their combination, offer a troubling reflection on the boundaries between art and craft, the savage and the polite, but also on the fragility of civilisations and modernity.

In the basement of the gallery, as a counterpoint, Daniel Dezeuze has assembled a collection of drawings, a jungle of flowers, insects, mosquitoes and snails.

Bordering on abstraction, these drawings depict a delicate but untameable nature, reflecting the artist’s obsession with “capturing the elusive”.
For almost fifty years, Daniel Dezeuze has been pursuing his research into the deconstruction of the painting, exploring the traditional supports and materials of painting, in search of a reflection on the history and function of the practice of painting. Very early on he disregarded the canvas, turning stretchers against the wall, playing with emptiness and three-dimensionality to go beyond the limits of pictorial tradition. Curious about nomadic and non-European cultures, he imbues his work with craft practices and anthropology. His singular itinerary involves experimenting with materials considered poor – wood, gauze, nets, fabrics – and with misappropriated objects. His work has greatly influenced new generations of European painters, and is now part of public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Carré d’art in Nîmes and the MAC, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille.