JULIAN CHARRIÈRE: PANCHRONIC GARDENS
Perrotin presents Panchronic Gardens, Julian Charrière’s first solo exhibition since joining the gallery. Combining installation, sculpture, film, and photography, Charrière’s projects often involve fieldwork in liminal spaces, from industrial extraction sites to volcanic calderas, from remote ice fields to nuclear testing grounds.
April 13 - June 1, 2024
Fossil fuels are so named because they originate from rocks buried deep in the bowels of the earth, formed over hundreds of millions of years from the decomposition of organic debris. Once extracted, these raw materials can be easily stored, transported, and burnt, making them a highly efficient energy source. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe experienced the Industrial Revolution, which relied heavily on hydrocarbon fuels for economic growth.
In his video And Beneath It All Flows Liquid Fire (2019), Julian Charrière displays a burning fountain as a metaphor for this coming conflagration. Presented at the opening of his first solo show organized by Perrotin gallery, this emblematic work highlights the role that fire plays in his art.
The volcanic rocks that make up the series A Stone Dream of You (2023) have been combined with orbs of black obsidian, whose glassy appearance resembles staring eyes. Arranged on the gallery floor, the minerals collected in Mexico bear witness to millennia-old geothermal phenomena: movements of the earth’s mantle, seismic tremors, and magma eruptions.
Encapsulating multiple temporalities, the programmatic, spectacular, immersive Panchronic Garden (2022) gives the exhibition its title. The word “panchronic” refers to an animal or plant organism that bears a strong morphological resemblance to an extinct species. They are also known as relict species. Panchronic Garden brings to life a garden of the third kind, where ancestral ferns reconstitute a biotope from the Carboniferous – the geological era when coal was formed.
In the age of the Anthropocene, where survival depends on redefining how we live in the world, Julian Charrière’s art portrays our understanding and perception of environmental issues. His work, however, goes beyond the confines of so-called ecological art and stands out for its ability to bridge the gap between conceptual approach and sensory experience, science and fiction, archaic processes and futuristic forms. The ecological crisis we are facing is primarily a crisis of sensibility.
Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin. Marshalling performance, sculpture, film and photography, his projects often stem from remote fieldwork in liminal locations, from sites of industrial extraction to volcanic calderas; remote icefields to nuclear testing grounds. By encountering such places where acute geophysical and cultural identities have formed, Charrière speculates on alternative histories and our changing ideas of "nature", often utilizing materiality and deep time as lenses for doing so.