Enfants Sauvages

The summer residence of the last King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, during the period of its inevitable collapse—an Arcadian garden offering refuge from the encroaching chaos. Late summer. Apollo walking amidst temples and lush, soothing greenery that concealed mysterious tales of court life.

Contrasting with this image were the—often cruel—pastimes of the aristocracy, alongside their fascination with wildness and otherness, an obsession tinged with the fear of death at the hands of barbarians.
Pleasure and decay.

Louise Marie Gonzaga, Queen of Poland—herself a brilliant, highly educated patron of learning—upon hearing the story of a child discovered in the Lithuanian wilderness who had been raised by a female bear, ordered this fascinating curiosity brought to her court. The boy, however, experienced little of court life; following the Queen’s death, he was sold and ultimately cast in chains.

“Wild children”—whether raised by animals or merely presented as such by opportunists exploiting their infirmities and suffering—captivated the imaginations of the nobility, minds already inflamed by myths and legends.

The figure of the wild, the alien, the non-normative—at once fascinating and alluring, yet also a source of fear and revulsion.
A body and behavior observed and analyzed, mythologized and demonized. The works of three artists—whose creative practice encompasses both painting and the use of spatial and sculptural objects—are presented as artifacts and figures emerging from mythic tales: participants in an ominous feast within an Arcadian garden.
Seemingly tamed wildness becomes a tool with the potential to shatter structures of power and subordination from within.

Corporeality, animality, totems, and fauns swirling in the midst of a mysterious garden.

Kuba Skoczek