The Swiss-French artist Julian Charrière is committed to environmental protection, he supports the non-profit organization Art into Acres for the preservation of around eleven thousand hectares of primeval forest in Peru.
The solar power plant, which he set up clearly visible in the basin in front of the Langen Foundation in Neuss, will later go to a community in Namibia and be used by national park rangers there in nature conservation.
So, ethically, Charrière can only be right about his work, one might think, and in many other cases of committed art the rest would be cool conceptual art, perhaps made up of alarming data, diagrams, interviews and such as might be required for a critical and conflictual understanding of art can be considered the standard today.
Not so in the Controlled Burn exhibition, which has no staggering numbers and voices about the state of the world.
The stately overview of the oeuvre of Julian Charrière, who was born in 1987 in Morges, Switzerland and lives in Berlin, consists rather of opulent rooms, iconic images, differentiated installations, of landscape photographs of deceptive beauty somewhere far out in the Pacific heat and arctic cold.
Its author may also actively contribute to the concerns that he has made the subject of his previous oeuvre, but as an artist he is above all this from a young age: a baroque theatrician.
He expresses his criticism of the ecological devastation in visually powerful, sometimes powerfully pathetic images, commutes, as required,
charisma of political works of art
Charrière takes part in research expeditions like his compatriot Pierre Huyghe and uses drones for his sometimes intoxicating images like Cyprien Gaillard;
Charrière has realized joint projects with the Berlin artist Julius von Bismarck.
Despite all his claim to arouse, he is also concerned with artistic transformation, for which he develops wasteful solutions such as frozen orchids and cacti, which could be cryotechnically preserved for posterity in the very distant future, and that in icy showcases whose electricity Charrière is switched off said solar system in front of the house.
According to the Langen Foundation, this covers the needs of the exhibition on the Lower Rhine.
With the ice flowers in the glass boxes, Charrière creates beguiling frozen drawings.
Then in turn he sprinkles paradisiacal photographs of the Bikini Atoll with irradiated sand, which dates back to the American tests with hydrogen bombs around 1950.
Again very nice, these bleachings, in which the radioactive parts can be recognized.
Or he wraps coconuts from the Marshall Islands, which are also nuclear-contaminated, with lead coats, strings them up like archaic cannonballs, cleverly alluding to the former rocket station on which Tadao Ando's exhibition house is located - but of course also to the enormous ones Difficulty keeping nuclear radiation at bay for all eternity.