SOLANUM BARETIAE – CHRISTINE CROZAT & BERTRAND HUGUES

“We have an ancestral past that makes each of our bodies a limited and infinite portion of the Earth’s history, the planet’s history, its soil, its matter.”
Emanuele Coccia, Métamorphoses, Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2020, p.29
 
The title of the exhibition is the Latin name of a flower – Solanum Baretiae. In 2012, American botanist Eric J. Tepe named the exhibition after a solanaceous plant found in Latin America, in tribute to Jeanne Barret (1740-1807). While Barret is best known for being the first woman to circumnavigate the globe aboard the ship l’Etoile under the command of Louis Antoine Bougainville, it’s equally important to know that she was also a botanist. Daughter of a farmer, she grew up in a very precarious situation. She worked as a servant and governess before meeting Philibert Commerson in 1754. A botanist and scientist, Commerson hired Jeanne Barret as an assistant in his plant research and archiving. They kept their romantic relationship under cover to highlight their professional collaboration. When they embarked on the Étoile in 1757, Jeanne Barret became Jean Baré. She dressed as a man, as women were forbidden aboard French naval vessels. With her breasts taped, her hair cut and her clothes loose, Barret passed herself off as Commerson’s valet. They crossed the Equator to Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, the Strait of Magellan, Tahiti, New Ireland, then the Indian Ocean: India, Mauritius, Madagascar and perhaps Bourbon Island (Reunion). Commerson, physically exhausted by the voyage, died in 1773. Jeanne Barret remained in Port Louis, opened a cabaret and married a naval officer. She returned discreetly to France and died without honors in the Dordogne in 1807.
 
“I’m only twenty-eight years old, I’m just a peasant girl from Burgundy, nothing predestined me to be the first woman to undertake such a voyage, and yet I did. It wasn’t the only exploit I achieved: during this expedition, I documented plants you’ve never seen, palm trees, extraordinary insects, produced herbariums, inscribed Latin names and drew. Go and look at the holotype of the bougainvillea and think of what you owe me.“ [1] The story and personality of Jeanne Barret constitute the main thread of an exhibition in dialogue between the botanist and the works of two artists: Christine Crozat and Bertrand Hugues. If we allow ourselves to enter a space of speculative narrative, it becomes possible to envisage the works of the two artists as artifacts of the story of Jeanne Barret’s life. The presence of plants is obviously central. Photographs of plants and cut-paper herbariums constitute the fictitious archives of the botanist-explorer.
 
Solanum Baretiae is as much fiction as it is reverie or tribute to the life story of a silent, invisibilized woman. First and foremost, it’s about walking through gardens, parks, woods and forests. To move around and take in the scale of living things, whatever the context. Wearing Christine Crozat’s original herbalizing shoes (1952), made of sandstone and glass, we set off to meet living species. These are recorded in phantom-like style on the blank pages of her garden notebooks. The herbal artist cuts out the silhouettes of plants. In this sense, movement and physical interaction are central to her practice. Within an infinite memory of forms, the artist subtracts, assembles, covers up, conceals and uncovers drawings of flowers, leaves and other observable living elements. She sculpts papers with multiple properties (opaque, transparent, thick, thin) to reveal a collection of forms. Unlike the work of botanists, the species are not listed by name, nor are they detailed, because there is no question here of dominating the living world. It’s more a question of imprinting and imagining the manifestations of a vulnerable memory. Similarly, Bertrand Hugues’ photographs (1967) are the result of time spent observing plant and floral species, combining them to create vulnerable sculptures. The artist assembles clover leaves, rose petals and tiny lichens to create dreamlike landscapes. Bertrand Hugues opts for a long time exposure with the camera, a technical choice that extends temporalities, practices and visions. The impermanence and ephemerality of small elements taken from living things are suspended in time and space. The photographs form a herbarium nourished by poetry: shapes, materials, transparencies, colors, fragile lines, cast shadows, malleable scales. Some images reveal small white scotches, discreet clues to the history of a plant archive practice.
 
Solanum Baretiae reveals the extreme fragility, poetics, emotional dimension and metamorphosis of the living. Bertrand Hugues and Christine Crozat focus on plant movements, both appearing and disappearing. With no desire to hierarchize or identify them, the two artists attempt to capture the shapes, silhouettes and particularities of ephemeral, evanescent beings doomed to certain transformation.
 
Julie Crenn
 
[1] GIANNECCHINI, Hélène ; DUGIT-CROS, Chloé. “Jeanne Barret” in Inventrices. Paris, Cambourakis, 2024, p.71.
 
MORE INFORMATIONS:
 
// Press kit
// Christine Crozat
// Bertrand Hugues
// Solanum Baretiae (30/10/24-10/01/2025 | Paris)