Poncet, Jean. Encounter, Lapérouse Museum, 2005-6,ill. (catalogue, English)

“Is there any news of Monsieur de La Pérouse?” Such is the question that Louis XVI is said to have asked on 20th January 1793, the eve of his execution. But no, no news from Monsieur de La Pérouse since he left Botany Bay on 10th March 1788.  Though it is not for want of looking for him and the two ships of the expedition with which the king had entrusted him, the Astrolabe and the Boussole. Rear-Admiral d’Entrecasteaux left the road at Brest on 28th September 1791 on board the Recherche, together with Captain Huon de Kermadec in command of the Espérance: Kermadec was to perish in New Calédonia, and d’Entrecasteaux during the passage to Java, without finding any trace of the shipwreck nor of any possible survivors. In turn Lieutenant Dupetit-Thouars began his search, setting sail on 22nd August 1792: he was taken prisoner by the Portuguese in Brazil and would never reach the Pacific. No news of La Pérouse until in 1827, when English captain Peter Dillon noticed a number of artefacts of French manufacture – a silver sword-guard, iron bolts, axes, knives, bottles… – upon landing at Tikopia in the Solomon Islands: the local inhabitants told him that these objects came from two large ships wrecked on Vanikoro, another island of the archipelago, “when the old men now in Tikopia were boys”. The following year Commander Dumont d’Urville would confirm the authenticity of the discovery and erect a modest coral mausoleum bearing the words “To the memory of Lapérouse and of his companions, Astrolabe, 14th March 1828” near the site of the catastrophe. Since then archaeological excavations have not ceased, both in the marine depths as well as on land, bringing to light hundreds of artefacts of all kinds, most recently the remains of an officer and the sextant of La Pérouse’s ship.

These material fragments of an old reality no doubt constitute a rich harvest for historians. But how lacking these mortuary remains are compared with the bright dream that directed the fatal expedition, as well as all the French expeditions of the time. For as they left towards these far-off lands, the French navigators were not after lucre, neither for themselves nor their country. All of them the sons of the Enlightenment, the followers of science rather than trade, what they were searching for was knowledge. The knowledge of the world in its diversity as well as its oneness: the diversity of the animal and the plant world, the diversity of people and their customs, but also this flame which makes humankind one under our common sky.

And now that today discount flights have made the whole planet accessible to holiday-makers, television shows pictures of the most remote, even most dangerous, corners of the earth to flabby viewers slumped on their couches, who will tell of the old navigators’ dream? In this (superficially) known world now only glanced over with blasé eyes, how can one evoke the desire to know, the anticipation of the unknown, the joy of discovery? My answer is: go and see Nathalie Hartog-Gautier’s exhibition, Encounter. You will see no lifeless fragments salvaged from the wreckage, no zoological or botanical specimens with their labels in their display cabinets. All these things that are evocative of Monsieur de La Pérouse’s voyage of discovery are however present. First the written works: Louis XVI’s instructions to La Pérouse and to the gardener of the expedition, the navigator’s journal as well as the books of the ship’s library. Then a few examples of the botanists’ gatherings from palms from Madagascar, ferns from the Far East, lilies from central America, and, more specifically Australia: she oaks, gum trees, banksias, and the grass tree. Lastly the animal world: nautiluses from New Caledonia, slender and deadly jellyfish, constellations of sea urchins. Yes, all these objects have been gathered together, and also multicoloured feathers, fishing hooks, nails, glass beads, but it is their aesthetic transfiguration, not their physical reality, which effectively evokes the exploration’s true nature, the dream that comes before it and accompanies it all along.

In her works Nathalie Hartog-Gautier makes use of diaphanous transparencies that have none of the fragility one usually equates these two words with. To the contrary with this artist of evocation the superposition of strata constitutes a very concrete way of juxtaposing two moments in history, two separate experiences linked however by causality, reality discovered and observed together with the impetus of the thought which preceded it and set in motion a whole company of men who left in search of it. Encounter presents us with physical traces of the expedition, an array of animal and plant exoticism, but an exoticism that calls for more than itself, whose only value lies in the thought which prompted the navigator to go look for it.

“Is there any news of Monsieur de La Pérouse?” Since 1827 there has been no lack of it and the archaeologists who carry on their research will continue to find new material traces of the unfortunate castaways; they will be able to tell us more about the circumstances of the running aground and the life of those who survived. But all this reality brought back to life will never project us in the thoughts, the desires, the dreams of the 18th century’s French humanists. Those of Louis XVI, caught by the scientific enthusiasm of the times and eager to unveil the last mysteries of the South Seas; those of La Pérouse, the executor of the royal will, gone in pursuit of his own dreams as much as his king’s.

One can often access a more intimate, a truer, level of understanding through dreams evoked, revealed, rather than the mere observation of reality. Such is the case with La Pérouse of whom Nathalie Hartog-Gautier is the enlightened and sympathetic revealer, his developer in the photographic sense of the word.

Cultural and scientific counsellor
Embassy of France in Australia