Pastoral Myths: Arcadia Revisited

What happens when you breathe new life into an age-old, dust-covered genre such as the pastoral? You can see the result at La Loge in work by six different artists.

The word "pastoral" calls to mind bucolic scenes with courtly shepherdesses, peaceful landscapes, and naked, dancing nymphs with, often, for some obscure reason or another, a guy with a flute also hanging around. It's a genre that has been practised down the centuries – from the poetry of Virgil to neoclassical and Romantic painting – and that is usually pretty close to kitsch. So how might that sort of theme be tackled today, in these times of ubiquitous cynicism? With a hefty dose of irony, it turns out, in the "Pastoral Myths" exhibition at La Loge.

Amelie von Wulffen takes up a number of bucolic motifs in her paintings as samples that almost look like they were made using Photoshop. The artistic duo Daniel Dewar & Gregory Gicquel has often worked with traditional artistic crafts such as ceramics and knitting; here, they are exhibiting two stop-motion films in which nude sculptures in clay take on a whole range of indecent postures. Jean-Marie Appriou, for his part, makes the kind of work that would have been disapproved of ten years ago and that may be again in ten years' time, but that here and now is suddenly permissible. Here, he presents sculptures of a beekeeper and two cypresses with a considerable kitsch quotient.

What really catches the eye at this exhibition is Steinar Haga Kristensen's contribution, which often draws on the visual idiom of the Norwegian Romantic approach to folklore. He has put up an entire wooden wall – with a door in it – that is made up of paintings, including work of his own and reworkings of works by others. He draws, for example, on traditional Norwegian woodworking techniques and decoration. Impressive!

Jessica Warboys presents a sound piece that refers to a pastoral poem. Olga Balema rounds everything off in an ironic way, painting wooden water troughs for animals in green and yellow – not coincidentally, the colours of the John Deere tractor brand. Even nature doesn't escape from the laws of corporate culture.

Pastoral Myths, > 25/6, De/La Loge