ETIENNE CHAMBAUD

The material basis for the Nameless series is a mixture of medium and bronze or copper dust applied on stretched canvas. Different animal urines –squirrel, mink, wolf, coyote, zebra, bear, lama, deer, dog, puma, lynx, etc.— set randomly on the canvas oxidize the metal, thus creating motifs that alter the monochromatic background.

Departing from the heroic and/or ironic figure of the artist urinating on his paintings (from Pasolini’s Teorema or Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings from 1977-78), the oxidations that compose each canvas are manifestations constituted and given form by the digestive processes of anonymous individuals from disparate species.

If for human eyes this only produces an amorphous image, reminiscent of human-made abstraction, yet reveals nothing of each non-human individual that “participated”, these oxidations preserve, at least during the time the series is fabricated, the animal expression (scent, pheromones, proteins) contained in each of the urines. Indeed, these possess a “semiotic” quality tied to the marking of territory, social hierarchy, or the signs of coupling belonging to each individual and to each species, but inaccessible to human understanding. Crystalized by the oxidation process, the sum of animal expressions that do not address the spectator, become a thing without name or shape, an improbable chimera that can only be mentally reconstituted through a text listing the species.