Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel

Press release

The Mammalian Fantasies series continues the artists’ long-term examination of the place of man, who is essentially just another mammal in an anti-speciesist bestiary. In their imaginary museum, all of the sculpted-wood items have been transformed by their hallucinatory visions. Precise and unhinged in equal measure, this corpus of works in solid oak depicts the chance marriage of a sow and a man, the excavation of harnessed oxen, the appearance of giant rabbits from Flanders and an exponential multiplication of human limbs. On level two of macLYON, the artists imagine pastorally inspired furniture and nourishing, sexual grapplings between reclining human figures and other smooth-skinned animals. On the third floor of the museum, a large wardrobe, whose surface is covered by a set of intestines, forms the centerpoint in a constellation of bas-reliefs depicting fragments of dismembered bodies. In the latter ensemble, foreground and background merge. Working by hand to recreate the effects of perfect duplication that only digital machines can produce, Dewar & Gicquel transform their primary subjects (abdomens, muscles) into a backdrop from which fresh motifs (arms, toes) spring forth and could, in turn, multiply and blend into the mass.