Sean Landers - Animal Kingdom

Catalogue of the exhibition Sean Landers. Animal Kingdom, presented at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (17 October 2023 - 10 March 2024).

This is an encounter with a universe that is as marvellous as it is mysterious: a parade of animals, a lion and a monkey with fake wood fur, a rabbit or a rooster staring intently at their observers, perhaps questioning their own humanity; a forest of birch trees with trunks covered in writing carved into the wood; a library displaying its fanciful titles like so many riddles or confessions by the artist.

For over ten years, the artist has been developing his series of animals with Scottish fur. This incongruous use of tartan, in trompe-l'oeil, is a double reference to Magritte: to his so-called 'cow' period of 1948, when in a deliberately coarse style he undermined the notion of 'good painting'; and to the tartan slippers that the Belgian surrealist wore to paint.

The ostensible false naivety and deceptive fantasy of the figurative painting of Sean Landers (born in the United States in 1962), inspired by European painting - the portraiture of the Renaissance, the Romantic landscape of the 19th century and the Surrealists - highlights both the political and aesthetic affirmation of the artist's choices.

Trained at Yale University School of Art in the 1980s, he explains the adoption of figuration as an alternative stance, a dangerous path but one that was inevitably irresistible.