The Many Noises of Catastrophe

Julien Segard has faith in death. He believes, it is only in death that there is a hope for regeneration. Exhibited across the five rooms of the gallery, his show consists of mixed media sculptures of plaster, bone, metal, wood, and cement. These are accompanied by ceramic fragments and paintings. In a central room of the gallery, two large watercolours Hexane (2019) and Heptane (2019) paint the chaos of a post-industrial post-digital doomsday: rivers of meteors, comets, blood and spit; animals and monsters trying to escape; shards of architectural fragments; one man with a briefcase and another clutching a swim ring falling from the sky.

In other rooms, small and large sculptures quieten the immediate chaos of the paintings, like drying skin around a fresh wound. Unlike the paintings, which capture the apocalypse in process, the sculptures portray a silent post-apocalyptic site. The thin pole of wood in Quiet Afternoon (2019) cuts through the calm of the same room, in Les Choses (2019), a cluster of ceramic fragments is neatly arranged on the floor. They look like a vertebra that has been broken into pieces, or a body flipped inside out to reveal the viscera-arteries and canals- as if trying to mimic the architecture of the insides of a body. In the adjacent room, An Evening Assembly I (2019) and An Evening Assembly II (2019), face each other. Evening I looks like an emaciated snake’s open mouth-a rigid forked tongue emerging out of the glottis. In Evening II, a curve meanders through the rigidity of a grid-like structure reminiscent of enlarged geometric patterns on a window grill.

During our conversation, Segard, who lives and works between Goa, New Delhi and Paris, confesses that the nomadic freedom he derives from the simplicity of his work is crucial to his process. The structures of his works might look complex but for him they are hands-on and easy to dismantle. The economy of this low-tech use of scrap and inexpensive material lends an assemblage quality to the structures that can adapt according to the spaces they are exhibited in. The volatility of the apocalyptic moment becomes a recurring theme throughout the show. Like an arrow mounted on a bow waiting to chart out a trajectory, many of his untitled sculptures, big and small, are directional: they maintain a sense of delicate balance. Blunt tools hang on flimsy thread from the ceiling; sharp tools are placed on a fulcrum as if ready to be launched, awaiting the archer or the javelin thrower’s release. They pierce chunks of bones and cement, freezing a moment that is on the brink of destruction. Clearly, A Second Coming anticipates an apocalypse.

The use of bones as a medium confirms the fact that the artist’s imagination is pre-occupied with the decay of the human body. An archeological impulse runs within Segard. A series of drawings of dilapidated chairs are layered on archival materials like cardboard files, old papers, and official documents, making time cyclical, like that of decay and renewal. Segard’s preoccupation with death and decay is not necessarily a morbid one. Instead there is a sense of lightness in his foreboding. "Imagine an archaeologist from the future discovering the legacy of this civilisation, a Mickey Mouse toy maybe?" he chuckles softly.

He strives to find mundane things beautiful. His archeological instinct is against preservation or museum making, "Conservation for whom? For a civilisation that will only become extinct?" Segard contests conservation in order to fight nostalgia.

Death, decay and disaster are not unthought of; apocalyptic imagination is a popular imagination. We are culturally well versed with the language of the apocalypse, a vocabulary recurrent enough for us to quickly recognise the catastrophe (in varying loudness) that Julien Segard’s work and the exhibition space is preoccupied with. The fact that the artist finds beauty in the mundane, shows through in his preoccupation with the narrative of the apocalypse. In her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster, Susan Sontag writes, "Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror." Although written more than half a century ago, her statement seems valid for every imagination of the apocalypse that has ever existed. The chaos of the giant end-of-it-all doomsday channels both the anxiety of survival in the everyday and the mundanity of mass destruction, into a larger than life event that wishes for, in Sontag’s words, "a radical disaffiliation from the society." However conventional this linear narrative of the end of the world might be, it is not as disorderly in Segard’s case, only an end to a beginning. Although not quite new his faith in cyclical time, regeneration, and cycle repeating itself is mildly dramatic, and somewhat charming. Unlike the prophesied second coming, which promises the return of Christ, A Second Coming is a godless one, where nature’s cycle of death and rebirth takes over. It awaits many such second comings and with them new beginnings.

We encounter the narrative of apocalypse many times, in many ways. What stays with us in particular, is the aesthetic of an apocalypse. Julien Segard’s A Second Coming is largely quiet. The silence has a specific temporality - the loudness of inaction right after press-pause - that lends to the aesthetic of the exhibit. Time becomes texture. The bluntness of the wood, the sharpness of the metal, the brittleness of plaster and ceramic, and the frailty of dilapidated chairs on old paper somehow exacerbates in this stasis. There are no moving images in this exhibition but some of the constellation of abstract shapes, in clusters or in isolation, have residues of movement lingering within them. One could press-play and parts of the apocalyptic demise would continue to unfold.

Indranjan Banerjee is a writer and art administrator based in New Delhi and is currently working at Khoj International Artists’ Association.