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JERGON

I am the hunger of a young wolf

Evelyne de Behr

Evelyne de Behr, Archive du chant, 2024

I am the hunger of a young wolf
a solo show by Evelyne de Behr
curated by Nicola Patruno
May 31 – June 14, 2025
Opening on May 31, 2025, 7PM

Jergon Wrangelstr. 76
10997 Berlin

In the fall of 2023, Evelyne de Behr took part in the final edition of the Montemero Art Residency (MAR) in Spain. Final, because the program was subsequently closed—one of many casualties of the extreme drought currently ravaging the agricultural region of Almería. It is this very soil that the artist incorporates into her work through paintings, video performances, and installations.

In her Nuanciers des Couleurs de la Terre series, de Behr combines various samples of Montemero earth with water and sugar, spreading them in thin, translucent layers on paper. The gesture is elemental, echoing the resourcefulness of prehistoric artists who searched the land for pigments—skills that are quietly vanishing in the age of pre-mixed paint. Yet the message is acutely contemporary: in J´ai bonne entente avec tout ce qui est beau, test tubes filled with Almería soil point to our widening disconnect from the environment. Much like the industrial paint tubes that separate us from the raw materials of color—be it crushed insects for cochineal red or charred bones for deep blacks—her work reminds us of the material histories that shape our world.


Evelyne de Behr, Le déluge I, 2024

This exhibition at Jergon Gallery, however, goes further. It boldly intertwines expressive force, depth, and a rare delicacy. Designed and curated as a site-specific project, the show interacts intimately with the architecture of the gallery, offering a multiplicity of potential pathways through the space. Visitors are invited into a sensory journey, moving from one piece to another, guided by subtle visual stimuli and delicate chromatic constellations formed from diverse materials in the paintings and installations. The spatial layout encourages a continuous dialogue between the works and their environment, as if the gallery itself breathes with the earthy textures and muted tones of the Almerían landscape.

De Behr also turns toward the realm of language: during her residency, she invited those around her to share a wish for the planet. These collective hopes were reintegrated into the world in poetic, ephemeral forms inspired by Tibetan prayer flags. In La terre, c´est ma mère, one such wish is written into the dusty Spanish earth, disappearing gradually into the wind. Others were painted with soil onto a boat made from recycled paper, later released into the Mediterranean Sea—an act that creates resonant, drifting connections between Belgium, Spain, and wherever the sea might carry them.


Evelyne de Behr, Sans titre, 2024

Throughout the exhibition, the soil of Almería lies underfoot, forming phrases that fade as one walks past. In our ears, the haunting call of the last O´O´ bird, recorded in 1979, echoes—a male crying out for a mate who will never respond. It is a paradox of modernity: technology allows us to archive that which we are simultaneously extinguishing. Yet de Behr resists this fatalism. She offers new forms of expression and listening—visual and auditory, human and non-human—interwoven in ways that gesture toward fresh modes of enunciation.

By blurring the lines between the poetic and the political, the natural and the constructed, Evelyne de Behr constructs a space of resonance and reflection. Her works are not simply to be viewed but experienced—each one a fragile, powerful bridge between the individual and the landscape, between the visible and the vanishing.

Text by Nicola Patruno, inspired by Olivia Perce
JERGON

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