EMMA WEBSTER: THE ENGINE OF BEASTS
Perrotin is delighted to present Emma Webster’s first solo exhibition in Paris, The Engine of Beasts.
October 12 – November 16, 2024
The guiding theme of the exhibition: The word Engine’s Latin etymon, ingenium, meaning skill or ruse, also signifies the ability to move easily from one medium to another, like a life-form striving to adapt, evolve, and survive. Between the transfiguration and fictive landscapes that serve as a barrier between the characters and the viewers, Webster reveals her interest in sentience, a combination of sentiment, sensation, and conscience.
The fox is lost in the darkness of the painting, and so are we. Something seems to catch his attention–he has just barely paused his movement. Crafty is part of a long tradition of animal painting: it is reassuring, as is the chosen technique, oil on canvas, which has been considered the most prestigious in the West for centuries. But soon various elements of this exhibition in Emmanuel Perrotin’s Paris gallery begin to disturb us. Some of them are related to the paintings themselves, and others are the result of the overall exhibition design.
These paintings make us reflect on the separation between humans and animals, as with any representation of an animal, whether it feels familiar or quite distant. In Emma Webster’s work, distance dominates. The animals appear solitary or in pairs within a landscape where humans have left no trace. The light is often limited, and the ground is emphasized, as with the lamb in Witness. But the very title of this painting draws our attention to another feature: the fact that the animal figure seems to perceive a presence that is invisible to us. A threatening mood recurs in these paintings, a sense that something could happen and cause physical harm.
As we see in this exhibition, Emma Webster proposes a beautiful and powerful reflection on the art of representation in the West, fearlessly integrating virtuality to express this new reality composed of so many layers of combined images and bodies. But her work echoes a centuries-old reflection by Guillaume de la Perrière who wrote Théâtre des bons engins (The Theater of Fine Devices) in 1535. These were not engines, but reflections on humanity. Today, in Emma Webster’s work, these reflections concern an expanded world where humans and animals, nature and artifice, and art and thought are inevitably associated.