A TALE OF WONDERING WILDS
Alliance Française de Singapour, Singapore
Initiated and developed the collaboration between Cuturi Gallery and Alliance Française de Singapour, leading the exhibition from its initial conception through to public presentation. Acted as lead curator and primary project lead, developing the overarching curatorial narrative and storyline of the exhibition while shaping the relationship between the selected artworks and the gallery space. Oversaw the full curatorial process, including artwork selection and placement, spatial direction, and the creation of detailed 3D exhibition renders to visualise and refine the exhibition before installation. Coordinated the translation of the exhibition’s conceptual framework into a cohesive physical experience, ensuring a clear dialogue between the artworks, architecture, and overall narrative of the show.
Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, A Tale of Wondering Wilds brings together five French artists from Cuturi Gallery's programme — Gaël Davrinche, Quentin Garel, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Julien des Monstiers, and Lionel Sabatté — to trace the passage from untamed wilderness to a world reshaped by humankind, unfolding through three stages: innocence, subjugation, and rebirth through alchemy, ritual and art.
Teetering between “wondering” and “wandering”, the exhibition frames nature as both a moving force and a questioning presence. A wild that shifts across time and territories, under human hands and through chosen narratives, while opening a reflection on what endures, what was lost, and what may still be reimagined. By reversing the gaze, the exhibition invites us to consider not only how humanity has shaped nature, but how the wild might in turn observe, remember and change us through our reverence, fear, industry, violence, care and enchantment?
In these wondering wilds, nature is never passive. It travels, resists, seduces, overwhelms and provokes human invention, sometimes even against itself. Bronze imitates wood, oxidised iron gives birth to animal bodies, printed metal becomes vegetation, and residue becomes form. Nature is not only represented; it becomes the guiding force of creativity, drawing humankind into a cycle of desire, possession, transformation and possible reconciliation.
Teetering between “wondering” and “wandering”, the exhibition frames nature as both a moving force and a questioning presence. A wild that shifts across time and territories, under human hands and through chosen narratives, while opening a reflection on what endures, what was lost, and what may still be reimagined. By reversing the gaze, the exhibition invites us to consider not only how humanity has shaped nature, but how the wild might in turn observe, remember and change us through our reverence, fear, industry, violence, care and enchantment?
In these wondering wilds, nature is never passive. It travels, resists, seduces, overwhelms and provokes human invention, sometimes even against itself. Bronze imitates wood, oxidised iron gives birth to animal bodies, printed metal becomes vegetation, and residue becomes form. Nature is not only represented; it becomes the guiding force of creativity, drawing humankind into a cycle of desire, possession, transformation and possible reconciliation.
A Tale of Wondering Wilds
Cuturi Gallery x Alliance Française de Singapour
21 August (Private Opening 20 August) – 1 October 2026
When the wild is given a voice, what story would it tell about us? Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, A Tale of Wondering Wilds brings together five French artists represented by Cuturi Gallery — Gaël Davrinche, Quentin Garel, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou, Julien des Monstiers, and Lionel Sabatté — to trace the passage from untamed wilderness to a world reshaped by humankind, unfolding through three stages: innocence, subjugation, and rebirth through alchemy, ritual and art.
Teetering between “wondering” and “wandering”, the exhibition frames nature as both a moving force and a questioning presence. A wild that shifts across time and territories, under human hands and through chosen narratives, while opening a reflection on what endures, what was lost, and what may still be reimagined. By reversing the gaze, the exhibition invites us to consider not only how humanity has shaped nature, but how the wild might in turn observe, remember and change us through our reverence, fear, industry, violence, care and enchantment?
In these wondering wilds, nature is never passive. It travels, resists, seduces, overwhelms and provokes human invention, sometimes even against itself. Bronze imitates wood, oxidised iron gives birth to animal bodies, printed metal becomes vegetation, and residue becomes form. Nature is not only represented; it becomes the guiding force of creativity, drawing humankind into a cycle of desire, possession, transformation and possible reconciliation.
ZONE 1:
The State of Nature
The exhibition opens in a garden of colour, innocence and abundance.Inspired by Rousseau’s idea of the state of nature, this first section evokes a humanity still peaceful, instinctive and vulnerable to the elements, living in a fragile equilibrium between desire and need. Before property, hierarchy and domination, human beings appear not as masters of nature, but as part of its rhythm. Gaël Davrinche’s floral paintings suggest nature seen through childhood: luminous, expressive and unguarded. His flowers are not botanical studies, but impressions of wonder, colour and memory.
Facing them, Julien des Monstiers’ large acrylic-on-canvas works create an immersive garden, already fertile, dense and on the edge of excess. Acting almost as unofficial walls, they shape the space like painted thresholds, enclosing the viewer within a world where vegetation expands beyond the frame. The garden is generous and radiant, but it is also overwhelming. In this first excess, one can already sense the human impulse to organise, contain and control nature in order to survive it.
At the centre of the room, Quentin Garel’s Gorille becomes a sign of living abundance. The gorilla suggests a thriving ecosystem, an environment dense and balanced enough to sustain complex life. Yet the sculpture also introduces a first ambiguity. It embodies strength, balance and primal power, recalling a natural order where force is part of equilibrium. Its scale impresses, but it also overwhelms. Abundance may become saturation. Presence may become pressure. Cast in bronze while retaining the tactile appearance of carved wood, Garel’s sculpture blurs the line between living matter, artefact and trophy.
ZONE 2:
The Nature of States
The second section turns away from nature to the systems that transform it.Here, the title reverses Rousseau’s idea of the state of nature. Once human beings create property, comparison, jealousy, hierarchy and power, nature is no longer simply lived with. It becomes organised, possessed and used. It becomes a landscape of states: political states, economic states, colonial states, psychological states.
Nature is no longer untouched. Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s palm trees become central figures of this transformation. Often associated with paradise, the palm also evokes a nature transported across continents, inserted into foreign landscapes, used to fix imaginaries of elsewhere and sometimes to represent the so-called exotic or underdeveloped. The palm becomes both natural and ideological: a living form turned into décor, symbol, territory and power.
The room becomes scarcer and more shadowed, suggesting a landscape reshaped by pressure, movement and adaptation. Lahlou’s metallic and negative-like surfaces turn vegetation into something spectral: still present, but altered.
Quentin Garel’s Mask of the Camel extends this reflection on survival and use. Like the palm tree, the camel carries a history of endurance. It is an animal of scarcity, resistance and harsh climates. Yet it is also an animal long placed at the service of human movement, labour and survival. Its resilience is admired, but also used. Together, the palm and the camel evoke a world in which nature does not disappear; it adapts, persists and is repeatedly transformed for human needs.
ZONE 3:
The Alchemy of Ends
The final room is entered like a cave. Not a mere archive of what remains: a ritual chamber where impossible is birthed. Here, the exhibition turns toward transformation as an ambivalent force. Human intervention may wound, extract and dominate the living world, yet it may also become a gesture of preservation, reinterpretation and repair. This final section considers how the same impulse that reshapes nature can also give form to grief, return meaning to what has been damaged, and generate new myths from the fragments that remain.
Lionel Sabatté’s animals appear as traces from an altered world. His felines, lions and phoenixes echo prehistoric wall paintings, as a meditation on the human need to record and preserve animal forms. Made from oxidised metals, dust, ash and residual substances, they seem to emerge from sediment, corrosion and memory. They are not only images of loss, but ceremonies of rebirth. In the center of these paintings, Quentin Garel’s Ursus, resembling a polar bear, appears as a premature relic: an animal still alive, yet already haunted by extinction. Behind it, Lahlou’s darker Nature Morte reinforces this tension between past, present and future.
On the opposite wall, Lionel Sabatté's Bouquet becomes the exhibition's final meditation on humanity's creative power. Framed by Mehdi-Georges Lahlou's darker paradisiac landscapes and facing Ursus, the painting transforms the space into a quiet sanctuary, drawing the viewer toward an image suspended between earth and sky. Composed of alchemical compounds, its celestial forms simultaneously evoke a flowering bouquet and a cosmic horizon, embodying nature's perpetual cycle of germination, decay and renewal. Echoing Rimbaud's Alchemy of the Word, the work celebrates imagination as an act of transformation, where matter is endlessly reinterpreted rather than merely reproduced. Neither celebratory nor accusatory, Bouquet reminds us that humanity's greatest power lies not in mastering nature, but in the freedom to continually reinvent its meaning through creation, where invention may become either domination or wonder, exploitation or care.
The exhibition does not end in death, but in alchemy. Like Rimbaud’s alchemy of the word, it points to the human ability to reshape reality through vision, language and imagination, to create what did not yet exist, to interpret the world anew, and to transform endings into beginnings. Dust becomes body. Oxidation becomes an image. What disappears from nature may return differently, through gesture, form and imagination.