PRESS RELEASE

GOD WORK - by ANDRÉ DE NILS

“The man will turn into God” Kazimir Malevich

More nuanced are Christian philosopher Emmanuel Mounier´s words, when he says: “The man has the vocation of turning into a God, but this is irreversibly forbidden for him, which turns his aspiration into a new source of displeasure.” Here we have a handful of artists who, freely interpreting the book of Genesis, turn themselves into God for a week.

If the Almighty shaped matter, the artist - in his effort to replace Him as an absolute creator - should proceed in the same way. But, how can we forget the differences between them? I mean that if God created Nature and Being based on nothing, the artist must divest himself of Being in order to arrive at the starting point: nothing. This brings to mind Malevich’s Suprematist paintings.

Accepting the artist as a creator, it is important to note that he has never been able to create something absolutely new, something that is based in, and comes from, nothing. He has never been able to create something different than God had created before. In fact, the artist of today seems to try to undermine any form of divine creation. It is as if art, since the irruption of the Avantgard in the early twentieth century, attempts to fight against natural forms.

Malevich observes that after having subjugated Nature to geometrical forms on his canvas for the last centuries, the artist has in the present two ways to handle it: confrontation or denial. To the first of them we could add “modifying” or “affecting” Nature, as in for example Land Art (Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty or some interventions of Christo and Jeanne-Claude), that push against Nature with the will to become creators, instead of being simple servants to someone else's forms.

It is only God who has the right to rest after his work in order to contemplate what he has done as in "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Bosch. This God, in spite of giving himself some airs, observes his own creation, which is the real protagonist. The artist, quite the contrary, is not able to ever rest. He has to maintain a state of permanent activity, to avoid that himself or his work fall into oblivion.

The truth is that most of the artists involved in this project do not believe in the creationist theory nor in God. But, curiously, after having talked to them, I noted that they sympathized with God much more than, say, art critics. The artists do not realize that the Almighty is the greatest judge and critic. And they, who in a way were attempting to play God in this art exhbition, will have to answer for their acts in front of Him. Then we will see whom they prefer, because God is implacable and never wanted that man put Him into the shade.


André de Nils was born in Perpignan in 1973, from a Catalan mother and a French father. After his elementary studies in his homeland, he moved to Dijon for a short period. Then he settled in Paris and studied Philosophy in La Sorbonne Highly influenced by professor Louis-Philippe Renard, André started to study Aesthetics and Arts History. Author of Religion dans l'art du 20 ème siècle (Les editions du Midi, 2004) and Du mythe à la toile (Renoir, 2007), among others, Nils also wrote for the international press and for important magazines. His critical study about the French-Rumanian video-artist Sophie Noir gave him international recognition.