Les Morsures de l’Eau

2021

In this project, Venice is observed through a simple device: a small cube filled with water placed in front of the lens.

The water inside the cube was tinted to match the color of the lagoon. This miniature volume becomes a reduced model of the environment itself.

As light passes through it, the city bends and dissolves. Architecture drifts toward abstraction, as if Venice were slowly merging with the element that surrounds it.

After Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, Julien Mauve once again turns to Italy. With these new works, the artist invites us to become aware of climate change by observing it from a new perspective: rising sea levels pose a real threat to Venice and its lagoon, this unique and precious place governed by the fragile balance of its delicate ecosystem.

By invoking the concept of abstraction, Mauve’s approach appears as an antidote to the decadence described by Gerolamo Rovetta in Under the Water and to the suffocating atmosphere of human decline perfectly portrayed by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. Here, by contrast, the anthropic element is absent, the city seeming stripped of its inhabitants. Human interaction relinquishes its role as protagonist, disappearing beneath the testimony of closed doors and windows and shops slumbering under the arcades of the porticoes. If the miracle comes, it will be passively embraced, just as Venice embraces its fate: everything now stands softly still, the Zeitgeist suspended, awaiting what is to come.

Venice transforms into a relic purified by the flood. Water becomes Holy Water: cleansed of putrid debris and mud, it generates images that are sometimes blurred, the buildings deliberately captured out of focus at the moment of the rising tide, creating—through a paradoxical magic—a new landscape, serene, dreamlike, and mysterious. This new atmosphere is calm and shaped by the grandeur of the past, which refuses to fade away and gives way to an infinite contemplation in which everything seems destined to become a witness to the imperishable memory of the magnificent Serenissima.

The majestic figures of the golden mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica, symbols of the ancient power of the most important port city of the Middle Ages, watch the water rise alongside the sacred presence of Christ in the Church of San Michele, and we ask ourselves: how will Venice die? Suddenly swallowed like the myth of Atlantis, or slowly decomposed, carrying its memory away with it? The lagoon city, unlike Titian’s Venus Anadyomene, will sink, for climate change leaves no chance for the possibility of resurrection. Perhaps the time when humans held any power over its unfolding has passed, and retreating, they surrender themselves to the sublime vision of the pearl of the lagoon.

Vivana Gatica