“Still Complaining Forest” by Olaf Breuning, the hangover – Libération

If the trees could complain, would we hear the forest moan? Sensitive to the moods of nature, the Swiss artist Olaf Breuning photographed an undergrowth from which growls in the form of onomatopoeia escape, formed using branches, like in a comic strip: «GRR, OOF, HUMPH…» said the forest. This is not the first time that the artist has echoed plants. Already in 2009, he had used this type of wild staging. For his exhibition at the Parisian gallery Semiose, “Still Complaining Forest”, he once again becomes a spokesperson for the woods: “It’s true that things have changed in fifteen years. It was quite childish at the beginning, a sort of game, but today, not a day goes by without us learning a little more about the destruction of nature and global warming, he admits. Now I have a daughter, I see things differently.” With the comic and disenchanted tone that characterizes him, Olaf Breuning, who lives in the countryside north of New York, testifies to “his love for nature” in falsely naive paintings and funny photographs with a message.

Monochrome patterns of green leaves, red and purple mushrooms, spoon-shaped trees, and pink flowers fit together like childish puzzles on his canvases. The self-taught man has developed a technique using large wooden stamps to paint his paintings: “Everyone took up painting, why not me?” A satire of landscape painting, these ingenuous canvases show the artist’s voluntary, clumsy and touching approach to appropriating a medium. Fortunately, Olaf Breuning has not abandoned photography, a reservoir of forms where he still has fun “comment on the world”. There, he attacks the hypocrisy of the contemporary world, weak-willed in terms of ecology. In Leave Me Alone, four characters dressed as Yeti, like Chewbacca the wookiee, photographed like the Beatles on Abbey Road, do not seem happy to be disturbed by the lens. In another photo (The Edge), a terrestrial globe in the shape of an inflatable balloon leans dangerously on the edge of a precipice: when will the end of the world? There is a form of circus tragedy and grand guignol in the art of Olaf Breuning. Like this zombie with rolling eyes in a short video: he’s a brilliant Japanese dancer, Instagram star, who convulses dressed in a costume of red flames designed by the artist. The world is burning and Olaf Breuning, with a heavy heart, is consumed.

“Still Complaining Forest” by Olaf Breuning, at the gallery Semiose (75 004) until 21 December.