Combining modern art and contemporary art with happiness, the Parisian spring fair offered us a 25th successful edition between 29 March and 2 April. Through a “Promise” sector dedicated to young galleries and to very small emerging creation, we were able to make beautiful discoveries, and rediscoveries, with 154 galleries from 25 countries brought together. Here are a few.
At Dilecta, the tiny grey paintings by David Kowalski (1979) struck us with their strangeness and great poetry. Strange in their reduced format, but also their photographic framing; strange monochrome that might suggest that they are drawn; strange also their repetitive patterns: bushy landscapes of sub-The wood emerges from ghostly silhouettes of deserted houses or from views of empty interiors with windows pierced by pale lights…
Courtesy Dilecta.
Photo / Nicolas Brasseur
Landscapes painted in greyish hues that look like fairy-tale or film-noir scenery… Yet it is a great softness that emanates from these canvases, created by superimposing layers of paint, erased, faded, or even sanded in places. And it is probably this subtle interplay of additions and removals of matter that creates the vaporous density of these silent landscapes.
Gray poets
You had to lift your head to see Mark Jenkins’ (1970) Roof Girl perched on the top of the Danyzs gallery skyline. Dressed in jeans and a banal sweatshirt, with her hands in her pockets, her face bent over by her hair, this teenage puppet destined to hit the passerby with her incongruous presence could go unnoticed, just like most street sculptures American artist.
Courtesy Danysz Gallery
Thus staged in the position of the voyeur, in an inappropriate place, the faceless teenager leaning on the void had, however, enough to interplay the barge… The undefined faces condensing hundreds of faces (photographed in the room) of Laurent Lafolie also evoke the vulnerability of being through the fragility of the image, on the stand of the gallery Binôme…
© A2Z Art Galler
Troubled faces
Fragility we have also seen magnificently put into abyss in the collages of photographer and fashion designer Antwerp Gert Motmans (1972), shown at the Esther Woerdehoff gallery. Composed from torn photographs or newspaper clippings and fragments of small painted landscapes mixing the truncated faces of skies, mountains and seas, these patched images give a glimpse of the fantasy of remembrance.
Also enigmatic are the large landscapes, beautifully painted with oil by Li Donglu (born 1982 in Guangzhou, China). Deserted and timeless landscapes, often nocturnal, icy mountains, boiling earth, smoky rocks, and misty woods, evoking some primitive cosmogonies heralding Chaos / mixing Genesis with Chaos…
Transparencies
More soaring, the palimpsest landscapes of Yann Lacroix: lush vegetations invading architectures, or rather, overlapping with architectural views as if time (or memory) had deposited there by strata.
An impression made by the interplay of transparencies and gradations, bringing the colors, more or less bright or faded, into resonance. Just as the forms that, between appearance and disappearance, plunge us into the vagueness of reminiscences or the fog of dreams. The landscape here is Interiority.
> David Kowalski
Dilecta
49, rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, Paris III
> Mark Jenkins
Danysz Gallery
78, rue Amelot, Paris III
> Laurent Lafolie
Galerie Binôme
19, rue Charlemagne, Paris, IV
> Gert Motmans
Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
36, rue Falguière, Paris XV
> Li Donglu
A2 Z Gallery
24, rue de l’Echaudé, Paris VI
> Yann Lacroix
Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou
45, rue Chapon, Paris III
Stéphanie Dulout