LÉOPOLD RABUS – LES PROPRIÉTÉS DES CHOSES
2021-03-22When I asked myself how we name and classify the living and all that surrounds us, I was referred to a popular medieval scientific book by the 13th-century Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus On the Properties of Things. The book deals with 19 things and dedicates a large portion to birds, such as partridges and storks. The author bestows on each subject what seems to be a stamp of approval, a seal of the divine. For example, saints will speak to the trees and the birds, and the birds respond.
This is not the case in Frans Snyders’ painting Concert of Birds (1629-1630), in which the artist uses an Aesop fable to bring together a wide variety of exotic and native birds on the same tree. Here the treatment of the animal kingdom turns into an encyclopedic and colonial manifesto. A perfect witness of the Baroque period, this way of categorizing is still found at museums today, for example in my neighboring village where I admired a collection of naturalized birds. It is a strange feeling to see these birds all next to each other, losing all singularity and merging into a neat species, arranged on their classifying trees! These trees capture only a tiny part of what this or that bird was in its environment.
Opposite – 8 oiseau, 2020
Exhibition runs through to May 1st, 2021
Wilde
24 Rue du Vieux-Billard
CH – 1205 Geneva
Switzerland
