“Re-enactment” describes a method of staging historical events, the degree of authenticity being left to the respective director’s discretion. With the director being Jean-Pascal Flavien, one departs the path of history and freely roams the realms of fiction and imagination.

The installation in the evn collection consists of a table featuring a white top, three second-hand designer chairs, and three plexiglass models. When viewed from a bird’s eye perspective, the tabletop turns into a white canvas. Because of the objects arranged on it, whose colors are in stark contrast to that of the tabletop and which take on the appearance of geometric surfaces, the whole ensemble makes the impression of a Suprematist painting. For Kazimir Malevich, who left the concrete world behind, Suprematism was the beginning of a “new civilization.”

To a certain degree, Jean-Pascal Flavien’s objects can also be understood as abstractions of another life form. The dinosaurs and their creative shacks presented on the table (Double Event, Half-Mirrored, Double Ray) are no doubt concrete, yet at the same time they are so far removed from our reality that the latter rather resemble ideal spaces. The artist plays with the shift from one civilization to another, combining the allegedly prehistorical habitat with high-end products of the present time: a table and plastic chairs by the star designer Joe Colombo. A characteristic of this very “Chair 4867” (1968), the first injection-molded model to be industrially produced in one piece, is its special flexibility with regard to in- and outdoor use: the chair may be both displayed in a museum (as a classic) and be used in the open air. Jean-Pascal Flavien, too, sets his creatures free. In 2007, he mounted his installation Viewer in the Brazilian jungle near Rio de Janeiro. It can well be imagined that such alien creatures as dinosaurs would fit into such an environment. This was anticipated by the artist in his drawings (see also Jean-Pascal Flavien, A Day before a Day, 2005, No Level, 2005 and Red Moravec, 2004) and illustrates the limits of the real world: “It is a world without us, a world we do not see” (Jean-Pascal Flavien).

Heike Maier-Rieper, 2011 (translation: Wolfgang Astelbauer)