From the 17th century onwards, the French expression nature morte (literally ‘dead nature’) has been used to refer to still life, the field of painting that represented nature – flowers, fruit, fish, game, or various objects of use – through symbolic and allegorical meanings that explicitly referred to its fragility and ephemerality, and indirectly also to the vanity of human life.

Today, in the dark perspective in which we live, where the unjustified action of man is contributing to the impermanence of nature – or even to its annihilation – the term nature morte takes on even greater relevance.

The works on display at the CID of Grand-Hornu question, provoke or encourage those mechanisms that nature uses to support its transformation, aggregation, decomposition and then regeneration, creating a collection of experimental works – curated by Veerle Wenes – that highlights the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between man and nature.