Ink, paint and polyurethane varnish on resin. Edition of 3 unique multiples + 1 artist’s proof, enhanced by the artist. Certificate of authenticity number 2/3.
Nicolas Lacroix, exhibition "Fresh to death", Lacroix Gallery Paris:
There is something human in the representation of the bear, which is at the centre of this exhibition, as a reflection of man and his condition. We can perceive a new Thinker, contemporary and contemplative, meditating on the world and its state. The Ajee bear is universal: when a life-size prototype was exhibited at the OFF Art Fair Brussels in April 2014, many visitors to the fair thought they knew it (again). Like the bear of Pompon, which expresses power and majesty in the simple fact of walking, Anne Juliette Deschamps’ bear also expresses humility in the face of the immensity that surrounds it. He starts a movement; after sitting down he gets up, does not resign himself. The bear is the man, king of a world he no longer understands.
The historian Michel Pastoureau noted that "men and societies seem to be haunted by the memory, more or less conscious, of those very ancient times when with bears they had the same spaces and prey, the same fears and caves, sometimes the same dreams and the same layers". The memory is still there, palpable and poetic, and the bear is now adorned with unreal colours - in addition to the icy white, sepulchral black, glacier blue or fluorescent pink - which express the contrasts and contradictions of the world, its beauty and dangers, its surprising singularity and its disturbing strangeness. Before being scientifically defined as light, colour was first perceived as matter, as the envelope that covers things.
"Anne Juliette Deschamps’’’chromatic history’’ is similar to that of other cultures’’ which do not isolate the coloured units in the Western way, but are based on their own parameters. The essential thing is not to know if a color is red or blue, but whether it is dry or wet, smooth or rough, soft or hard, deaf or sonorous. Anne Juliette Deschamps’ colours thus take on a new meaning. The bear comes in many different sizes, ranging from about ten centimetres to life-size.
