BURGART: "The Apocalypse Tapestry is the story of an encounter..."

Apocalypse 1-14-21 is the story of an encounter with an immense work, as beautiful as it is enigmatic, as terrifying as it is hopeful: the Apocalypse Tapestry exhibited at the Château d'Angers.

 

What I saw appeared to me like a mirror reflecting the concerns, fears, and aspirations of our time.

After this meeting, I felt the need to understand, to seek meaning in what I had seen by returning to the source: the text of the Apocalypse written by John of Patmos in the 1st century AD.

 

This is how this series of large paintings began, with the desire to be part of this story, to perpetuate it, to bring it into the 21st century.

 

This work was done over a long period, maintaining a positive energy to avoid succumbing to existential discouragement. For John's text speaks of catastrophes, destruction, and death...

His visions of "the present and what is to come" are painful and frightening. Plagues and chaos follow one another...

The Book of Revelation, according to Saint John, is a text of revelation that speaks of a world reaching its end and the imminence of a new world. It is not the announcement of the end of the world but the announcement of the end of time, which signifies a radical new beginning, a kind of "reset," a new order into which only the righteous will enter.

 

I approached this 1st-century text and these 14th-century tapestries as contemporary 21st-century paintings. Their structure is narrative, a blend of realism, surrealism, and fantastical bestiary. Not all of the tapestries fit into my world. Some parts are too static or too enigmatic. I had to make choices, often instinctively, to find the path connecting this medieval iconography to my universe—that of my hybrid men with bird heads—and to extract the points of convergence with our own century, highlighting the continuity of the challenges humanity faces throughout the ages.

 

Every day we see signs of the fragility of the Earth's ecosystem and we now know that humanity is at risk of self-destruction.

It is no longer religious tradition that speaks, but science and current events…

 

So let's pay attention

"Because the time is near..."

 

 

But also near is this new world where the River of Life, clear as crystal, will bathe all living things, where trees will bear fruit twelve times a year, and where cities will be truly radiant.