Australian artist Ron Mueck is exhibiting at the Fondation Cartier in Paris

The Fondation Cartier in Paris has opened an exhibition of Australian artist Ron Mueck, the creator of fantastic and at the same time naturalistic sculptures that violate all scales of reality. The main themes of the current exhibition are death, fear and violence, which is not at all surprised by the Kommersant correspondent in France Alexey Tarkhanov.

In a glass box of Fondation Cartier, built by Jean Nouvel, huge, half-human skulls are piled up in three pyramids. It looks like a ruined graveyard of giants. This work is called “Mass”, and it was first brought to Paris from the National Gallery of Melbourne, for which it was made. One hundred white-as-chalk skulls made of fiberglass and a new 101st, cast from metal, at the entrance to the hall.

The author of the installation and the hero of the current exhibition, Ron Mueck, was born in 1958 in Australia, but lives and works in Britain, on the Isle of Wight in the middle of the English Channel. This is Mueck’s third exhibition at the Fondation Cartier: in 2005, his very first personal exhibition took place in Paris, consider the opening. The second exhibition was staged in 2013, it was a huge success, and now the third has arrived. Fondation Cartier might be happy to show Mueck more often, but the artist is meticulous, making one sculpture can take a year.

For a quarter of a century of work, he created only 48 works, each without exception. Months are spent on the formation of artificial bodies, the same amount on the exact imitation of every hair on the face and body, age spots, eyelashes, transparent eyes – always much more or much less than the real scale. His works are either dwarfs or giants, none of them out of proportion to man. The photograph does not convey this feeling completely: the impressions are enhanced by the fact that the viewers themselves participate in the installation, bringing their own growth as a ruler.

As the artist says, while building pyramids from dead heads, he was thinking about the Parisian catacombs with their skulls of former townspeople lined along the walls. The entrance to them is located a hundred meters from the Fondation Cartier. For Mueck, “Mass” is vanitas, remember death. For the Russian viewer, other associations are obvious, not so much with Mandelstam’s “Unknown Soldier”, but with the popularly known “Apotheosis of War” by Vasily Vereshchagin. Mueck’s work is already six years old, but now everyone – both viewers and critics – is celebrating its new sound: the war has returned to Europe and is again sowing the fields with skulls.

The impersonality, the recurrence of death in an era of massacres is mitigated by only two works out of five. Both talk about the future, both depict newly born babies. The “Girl” (sculpture of 2006) stretched out on the podium for all five meters of her gigantic height – with the remains of the umbilical cord, in ancestral blood, with her hair stuck together, she looks at the world inhabited by midgets for the first time. Another “Child” (2000), a miniature of 25 cm, is mounted on the wall in the pose of a newborn, raised by the legs, and looks like something like a crucifix suspended above the bed in the world of giants.

This year’s work is three huge Dobermans, ready to rush and grab their throats, not helper dogs from Andersen’s Flint, but the personification of Cerberus, not put to sleep by Orpheus and not defeated by Hercules. Real black demons, whose tense bodies and menacing postures are capable of frightening, even though it is clear that these are just sculptures. An obvious allusion to how the power, bred to control other people, breaks free and turns against the educators. Man’s friend easily becomes an enemy after a simple change of scale.

Unlike the skulls laid out in the light, the dogs are hidden in the dungeon under artificial light, which makes them even more intimidating. There is also a new small sculpture “This Little Pig” showing five men slaughtering a pig. The artist did not bring their figures to the usual luminous credibility, this is a traditional sculptural group of murderers, casually doing their job. The more understandable is the final work “The Man in the Boat” (2002), where a naked man sits in tired despair on the bow of a large black boat: he is being taken either to a conditional afterlife, or to a real, not the best future.