Thomas Demand - Thomas Demand - La Carte d'après Nature - 2010

La Carte d’après Nature, published on the occasion of the exhibition conceived by Thomas Demand at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Paloma, takes its title from Magritte’s short‑lived magazine La Carte d’après nature. From 1952, and over 14 issues, he combined poetry, illustrations, short stories and other contributions, and sent these publications as simple postcards. In a similar vein, the artist Thomas Demand has selected for the exhibition the works of 18 artists.

The works are connected by two main ideas: tamed nature and surrealism as an artistic form as envisioned by Magritte. Just as Magritte linked ideas from different horizons, Thomas Demand has chosen artists from different generations: Saâdane Afif, Kudjo Affutu, Becky Beasley, Martin Boyce, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Ger Van Elk, Chris Garofalo, Luigi Ghirri, Leon Gimpel, Rodney Graham, Henrik Håkansson, Anne Holtrop, August Kotzsch, René Magritte, Robert Mallet-Stevens, as well as Jan and Joel Martel.

The book, designed by Thomas Demand and Naomi Misuzaki, pushes further the notion of Magritte’s free association, by combining a wide range of works in an elaborate exploration of the disjunction between the representation of art and representation itself. The engaging essay by Christy Lange traces this idea that a representation of nature is always a simulacrum through the work of various artists, for example linking the surrealist resonance of the “impossible landscapes” of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri to Magritte’s playful canvases and to Demand’s photographs of his paper sculptures.