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After the hunt: energetically wrought banisters, door handles and chandeliers are among the fixtures created by Saint Clair Cemin for the renovated Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris

Art in America, Feb, 2008 by Brooks Adams

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How often does an artist get a dream commission for a big design project that changes his life and snaps his work into a whole new focus? The choice of Saint Clair Cemin to design all the new bronze fittings, light fixtures, stair rails and decorative panels for the renovated Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris seemed natural enough. He has, after all, in the past decade and a half created all manner of public fountains and colossal outdoor sculptures in Europe, America and Brazil (where he was born in the southern city of Cruz Alta in 1951), and his work has consistently flirted with the rococo and the grotesque. Yet what might have been another ho-hum piece of public art, not to mention a pedestrian affair of door handles and chandeliers, became in Cemin's hands (and with the inspired guidance of the museum's director, Claude d'Anthenaise) a visionary recasting of French tradition and a brilliant fusing of current sculptural trends.

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With this commission Cemin enters the discourse of French art history, as it were. The creation of the museum in 1967, to promote what its founders called "an ethical hunt, respectful of nature's equilibrium," was one of Andre Malraux's pet projects--his way of saving the architecture of the Marais, where the museum is located, from imminent destruction.

Cemin's work has always been characterized by an extreme diversity and variability of materials and depictive modes, often tending toward the humorous, cartooning form and the overtly philosophizing title. At the Musee de la Chasse, he achieves not only an overall unity but also a more serious level of engagement. Then, in a show at Daniel Templon, he juxtaposed two completely different kinds of work made at his studio in Beijing (where he has worked extensively since 2000): gleaming, high-modernist, stainless-steel biomorphs and densely textural, openwork bronzes that together gave the lie to any simplistic reading.

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The hunt might seem like an unlikely, or even undesirable, subject for contemporary art. But in a season when Courbet's late paintings of fox and deer hunts were creating a stir at the Grand Palais, Cemin's bronze reliefs in the Musee de la Chasse, with their strange, stream-of-consciousness depictions of flora and fauna, including falling birds and a life-size wolf's head, seem like hallucinations rendered from the hunted animals' points of view. According to d'Anthenaise's label copy, the reliefs "illustrate the mimicry between the animal and its territory." We also learn that Cemin incorporated many natural elements lifted from the Parc de Bel-Val in the Ardennes, which belongs to the private foundation that administers the museum. Indeed, the life casts of real branches from the park, not to mention a cast brace of pistols, float disconnected amid the imagery in two large bronze panels.

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The beauty and profundity of hunting as a subject in art reassert themselves throughout the newly renovated museum, which is a tour de force of sensitive showmanship on d'Anthenaise's part and includes several new works commissioned from contemporary artists. These include an imaginary re-creation of the founders' hunting cabin in the Ardennes by Mark Dion, and a heavily feathered ceiling assemblage of stuffed owls by Jan Fabre.

The museum now seamlessly spans two Baroque structures: the Hotel de Guenegaud, where it opened in 1967, and the Hotel de Mongelas, the adjoining structure (acquired by the museum in 2002), with its series of period interiors, which give the illusion that a great connoisseur lives there. The museum was closed for three years during the renovation and reopened in early 2007. In the Hotel de Mongelas, an early 18th-century building, the existing interiors were a mess, and the spaces had to be drastically reconfigured. A new courtyard entrance, stairwell and access to the galleries were created, and here Cemin's collaboration was crucial.

Thee museum has long been known for its offbeat installations and temporary exhibitions--I've been going there since the late '70s--but things seemed to have picked up steam since 1998, when d'Anthenaise became director. Robert Rosenblum was particularly enamored of the "Vies de Chiens" show in 2000, and I remember wanting to write about the late Surrealist extravaganza that was the Janine Janet retrospective in 2003. (Janet was a decorative sculptor and designer of window installations for Balenciaga and Givenchy in the 1950s and '60s.)

Today, the organization of the rooms is thematic. In the Salon des Chiens, for example, Jeff Koons's white ceramic Puppy (1998) sits on a mantelpiece under a memorable canvas by Jean-Baptiste Oudry depicting a bitch nursing her puppies (La Lice et ses Petits, ca. 1753). Cemin's work, though, steals the show with a combination of rough tactility and rococo refinement. While Cemin's bronze cabinet legs, door handles, banisters, sconces and chandeliers definitely recall the decorative work of the brothers Giacometti--Augusto and Diego (whose work for the Musee Picasso is practically around the corner)--they are also site-specific, playful and poetic.

After the hunt: energetically wrought banisters, door handles and chandeliers are among the fixtures created by Saint Clair Cemin for the renovated Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris

Art in America, Feb, 2008 by Brooks Adams

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