Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

The anxiety, the excesses, the slumps and the frenetic, breakneck era, we and the Earth are going through: this new group exhibition at La Criée centre for contemporary art offers a response in the form of a pause – an adjournment. With all the innocent promise of the first rays of dawn.

The title – Nobody, not even the rain has such small hands – is the closing line of a famous love poem written in 1931 by the American poet and painter e.e. cummings. Bringing together works imbued with attentiveness to the invisible and the fleeting, Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands counters the sound and fury of our everyday lives with the fragile beauty of growth and slow pulsation. Like the poet whose personification of rain blurs the boundary between humanity and nature, the works in this exhibition are situated at the junction between natural and manmade objects – between sensation and emotion. Like the poet who endows the rain with hands and vice versa, the works assembled here take issue with a distance – temporal, spatial, contemporary – which this challenge diminishes, or at least curbs. Like the poet who loves, this exhibition sets out to reflect tenderness, not to say an experience of dazzlement. And tomorrow we shall return to the fire.

Dove Allouche, Basma Alsharif, Burkard Blümlein, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Maggie Madden, Anthony McCall, Evariste Richer, Yoan Sorin and Florian Sumi, Stéphanie Saadé, Ana Vaz

curator

Sophie Kaplan

production

La Criée centre for contemporary art, Rennes