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

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.

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.

Cemin is a plunderer of sculptural traditions, poaching everywhere from the ancient Egyptians to David Smith, the French Rococo to the Brazilian Baroque. In a mammoth 2005 monograph by Richard Milazzo, Cemin invokes as his early heroes the trio of Brazilian sculptor O Aleijadinho (the Little Cripple), Antonio Gaudi and Joseph Beuys. We also learn from Milazzo that Cemin, who now lives in Paris, spent long periods there previously: from 1974 to 1978, when he was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and from 1989 to 1992, when he was dividing his time between Paris and New York.

Milazzo cites the precedent of Antoine-Louis Barye's bronze animalier sculptures to help account for similar subjects in Cemin's '80s work, and reminds us that as a student the artist used to live in the Rue de Val-de-Grace--right down the street from Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's The Four Continents fountain (1867-72), with its openwork globe, nude female allegories, rearing homes and turtles spouting water. Such grandeur and playfulness would not have been lost on Cemin, who became a self-taught sculptor in New York's East Village in 1983 and went on from there to quickly achieve wide recognition; he was, for instance, included in Jan Hoet's 1992 Documenta.

Milazzo reminds us that furniture and light fixtures have long been staples in Cemin's sculptural repertory. One of his first sculptures of 1983 was Candle Holder, a Rodinesque plaster-and-paint table sculpture with a base in the shape of a crawling nude woman. In 1999 he made Tree of Light, a Gaudiesque bronze candelabra in an edition of 100.

Several of the functional appurtenances at the museum are among Cemin's more exciting sculptures in recent years. The first door handle you touch to enter the museum makes you feel as if you were grasping an ancient Greek figurine of a horse, or some strange seashell. A lantern glimpsed in the courtyard is a classic 18th-century shape, whereas subsequent chandeliers evoke antlered hunt candelabra of yore, even as the pierced wall sconces give off glints of the grotto.

The quality of touch is key to the frisson of these new works. Inside the new stairwell, one long bronze banister from the first to the second floors undergoes a creepy-crawly metamorphosis. Running your hand up and down its modeled scales is like touching a snake (or perhaps grabbing the Loch Ness monster).

In the same stairwell, one writhing, many-armed chandelier hangs from a particularly long and striking chain of roughhewn bronze S-hooks. On the third floor, four large balustrade grilles are, in effect, two-sided sculptures. At first, when you come up the stairs and see them in silhouette, they look abstract, but they then reveal all sorts of playful narrative details when you walk past them again on the landing. For example, a striding nude woman, summarily modeled, with pudenda seemingly rendered with a single thumb print, is attached to the rest of the grille by her head, foot and knee. Nearby a little stag-man (Actae-on?) is similarly swept up into the larger sculptural proceedings.

The sculptures at Templon sat like neo-modernist baubles in a wide white space. The monumental bronze works recall octopus tentacles in particular: the best of these, Lila (dance), 2007, involves two interlocking creatures with three tentacles each. In a sense, they are not so different from the chandeliers in the Musee de la Chasse, though more massive and heavier. These are works you want to touch, but they also repel by their formal excess.

Of the stainless pieces, Mirror (Bianfu), 2007, is the largest, a freestanding, predominantly frontal structure, with odd symmetrical lobes resting on a pair of legs appended in back. Its abstract form evokes a pelvic close-up, but its frontality and its slightly impromptu support also suggest a decorative object of display, a large basket with a handle. The effect is rhetorical and a bit hollow. The more convincing steel pieces, based on geometric solids, are hunkered down, lying directly on the floor. Supercuia (2007) suggests an outcropping of multiple breasts around a central core. (In fact, the artist told me that the swollen forms depicted are based on the gourds used to drink mate.) In 2003 a colossal outdoor fiberglass version of Supercuia was exhibited in the Porto Alegre Biennial, in southern Brazil, and was then acquired by the city (the sculpture also exists in several colored fiberglass versions).

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The strangest of the steel pieces, Verbe Etre (2007), has ornamental joints, at once foliate and vaguely testicular. These connect the four flat surfaces of a pyramid. Nature and geometry are constantly morphing in Cemin's sculptural universe. The artist is a dreamer and an autodidact who quotes liberally, in conversation and in titling his work, from William Blake, Gaston Bachelard and Gregory Bateson. The surprise here was how well Cemin's oneiric streak integrates with the forms of Brazilian vernacular, high modernism and French decor.

The Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature reopened, after a three-year renovation, in January 2007. Cemin showed at Galerie Daniel Templon from Sept. 8 to Oct. 20, 2007. Richard Milazzo, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta, was published by Brent Sikkema Editions in 2005. Cemin will show new work at Brent Sikkema in New York in May 2008.

Brooks Adams is a writer who lives in Paris.

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