Animals enjoy a special status in the American artist's works, currently on view at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature

Ingrid Luquet-Gad

Painter Sean Landers unleashes his critters in Paris

A hare fills the frame, looking at us. It is attentive, on high alert, even. It looks ready to scarper at the slightest noise. The animal’s liveliness seems almost proverbial – like a rabbit caught in the headlights? This woodland creature, painted by the American artist <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8499/Sean-Landers" target="_blank">Sean Landers</a>&nbsp;in 2023, can currently be found in the heart of Paris, surrounded by numerous other critters. With painstaking detail, the artist has traced each individual hair of the animal’s brown fur and outlined the pearly veins of its hollow, perked-up ears.
Landers was born in 1962 and since the 1980s, a decade known for its forays into conceptual art, he has been, anachronistically, working on figurative painting. With playful and poignant erudition, he draws on different painting traditions from European art history. Among his diverse personal pantheon of artists are William Hogarth, Nicolas Poussin, Théodore Géricault, and Édouard Manet. However, it is his interest in Surrealism that often stands out, particularly the influence of <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7987/Ren%C3%A9-Magritte" target="_blank">René Magritte</a>.

I Live – the title of the painting – is a classic bust portrait, apart from the fact that it is of an animal. By representing the animal this way, the painting’s subject is magnified as well as transformed into an individual. Although this style of painting dates back to antiquity, it actually responds to a certain view of the world that comes from the Renaissance. The position of the painting’s protagonist echoes the era’s nascent spirit of humanism, which placed humans at the center of the world. When Sean Landers paints a hare, it’s not just a painting of a hare.
Landers created the piece specifically for his solo exhibition ‘Animal Kingdom’ at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, in which around 30 of his artworks are on display. A selection from one of his most well-known series is on the museum’s first floor: Animals with their fur coats decorated with tartan patterns are depicted in countryside settings. The exhibition unfurls over two floors and its juxtaposition with the permanent collection creates a dialogue with the taxidermized animals and other hunting curios. The hare is exhibited in the ‘Tick Room’, named after one of the research subjects of the biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll, a pioneer of the study of non-human perception. Through I Live, Sean Landers also becomes an ethologist.

The animal is seen from an animal’s point of view. Anthropocentrism may well have been one of the things we inherited from the modern age, but the current era is trying to break away from it. The hyperrealistic depiction of the painting’s protagonist takes place against a background of a birch forest. The tree trunks, carved with messages and other graffiti, can be read like the pages of a diary. After all, unlike humans, the forest listens without judgement.
By combining the bust portrait style and the motif of tree trunks that function like speech bubbles, Landers creates a psychological portrait of the animal. Refusing to focus solely on exterior perceptions, Landers uses the carved messages, written in the first person, to give us access to his inner world. In the specific case of I Live, the subject is not particularly verbose. The hare represents pure existence; it is total coincidence, captured in the moment. For example, one short message gets across its nervousness: ‘I only hear what I fear.’ Or, further down, ‘I only know where I go’ – short messages like mantras, taken from the intuitive wisdom of animals. The hare is not asking himself questions: He goes, he lives and never looks back. It is a philosophy for life: Our existence is too short for indecision! 
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Sean Landers is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1248/Petzel" target="_blank">Petzel</a>&nbsp;(New York),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1164/rodolphe-janssen" target="_blank">rodolphe janssen</a> (Brussels),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1448/Taka-Ishii-Gallery" target="_blank">Taka Ishii Gallery</a> (Tokyo, Kyoto), and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1299/Timothy-Taylor" target="_blank">Timothy Taylor</a> (London, New York).
Sean Landers, I Live, 2023. Part of the exhibition ‘Animal Kingdom,’ until March 10, 2024 at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris.
Ingrid Luquet-Gad is an art critic and PhD candidate based in Paris. She teaches art philosophy at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. 
Published on&nbsp;January 11,&nbsp;2024.
English translation: Catherine Bennett.&nbsp;
Caption for full-bleed image: Sean Landers, I Live, 2023 (detail). © The artist. Courtesy Petzel Gallery. Photograph by Christopher Burke Studio.

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