Dan Rawlings: The Earth Exhales
The title The Earth Exhales is a reference to John Betjeman, pioneer of “collapsology”and it gives a dystopian tone to Dan Rawlings’s Parisian show.
The gallery is pleased to present the very rst exhibition of Dan Rawlings in France featuring about thirty cut artworks. The exhibition title “The Earth Exhales” is a reference to a poem by John Betjeman, a journalist and poet known for his environmental activism and privileged relationship with the Queen of England in the 70s and 80s. The text was written in 1937 about the city of Slough, which was then going through an industrial boom that bore dramatic consequences on housing and nature. In it, the author wishes bombs would swipe out the city and calls for a fresh start. The sentence “The Earth exhales”, the very last line of the text, which made John Betjeman a pioneer of “collapsology”, gives a dystopian tone to Dan Rawlings’s Parisian show. In a similar way to Daniel Arsham who projects the spectator in a deserted world where vestiges of our industry and technology are the only things that remain, Dan Rawlings tries to go back to the essential by symbolically depicting a world where nature is reclaiming its rights.
