“Armature,” an exhibition and installation by Hervé Beuze has been on view at the Fondation Clément in Martinique since October and will be on view through December 2016. Here are excerpts from a review by Matilde dos Santos, who calls the show “s history of mankind”:

If a work of art is not necessarily explained by the biography of its creator, we can always find something from memory of the artist on an art work. For Hervé Beuze , the fisherman traps not far from his house, the habit of collecting on the way to the beach all sorts of things, to create new ones, the metallic and massive world of containers that his father unloaded on the port , will all be found many years later in his plastic vocabulary.

[. . .] Armature allows the artist to put in place the equation that has haunted him for a long time: body, human, history. For Hervé Beuze, working on memory is never just looking back to the past. He knows History is told in the present, to project oneself onto the future. It is a narrative that he has fine-tuned since the series of maps (Lizin kann, Machinique, Matrices, Mes Martiniques) where cartography was a deeply human geography, up to its history of man with The Armature installation. Memory is here as much individual as it is collective. Pegged to the body, it is shared. It is the real frame that the artist make visible. The work of Hervé is political in the first sense of the term, a work in the polis that raises questions and nourishes the debate. [. . .]

For full review, see https://aica-sc.net/2016/11/29/armature-by-herve-beuze-a-history-of-mankind/