Stéphane Manchematin

Garden gnomes seem so happy, good-natured in your home. But a spaceship lands on Earth and makes the garden gnomes naughty.

For a year, over all four seasons, Stéphane Manchematin and Serge Steyer keep returning to the Vosges where Suzanne lives. By now she looks back on more than nine decades of life, an old lady who stoically clings to the self-sufficiency of the house where she was born. The place lacks all comfort, neither electricity nor water supply help with cooking or heating. Nonetheless, Suzanne wants for nothing: When the indoor temperature drops to single digits in winter, she simply takes a hot-water bottle to bed and adds another layer of blankets. In the bathroom, water reliably flows from a groove, and if the light hits the surrounding glass carafes, it soon dances through the room.

A glass frame, some wax wings, a tale sculpted in dust on the glass, a mask of bees wings. The artist, Patrick Neu lives alone in a remote island village to the north of the Vosges, far from all of the central focal points of the world of art. He creates slowly and carefully with the patience inherited from the primitive Flemish artists, which whom he dialogues explicitly in works that border the ephemeral and tend towards a rare perfection. One day, the director of the Tokyo Palace in Paris pays him a visit: after following his work for fifteen years, he wants to commission him with his first individual exhibition. He accepts but will not change his method in any way. In the background, the old truth of the salamander, above all, an artist should be able to hide and keep his mystery.