ELMGREEN & DRAGSET, THE POWER OF THE ABSURD
France – Metz A dummy Prada boutique set up in the middle of the Texas desert in 2005, a drowned collector floating in a pool at the Venice Biennale in 2009, a contemporary art centre transformed into a fictitious art fair in Beijing in 2016, a swimming pool in the shape of a giant ear […]
ART BASEL, THE HIGH MASS OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Basel – Switzerland A look back at the Basel contemporary art fair, held from June 12th to 18th, in anticipation of Paris +Art Basel from October 18th to 22nd. Two hundred and eighty-four galleries, over 4,000 artists from five continents, 82,000 visitors, a Rothko offered for $60 million 1 … the figures for the world’s […]
TAISIIA CHERKASOVA, THE ROAD OF DREAMS
FRANCE – PARIS Two lighthouses shine in the clear night at the bend of a road that runs deep into the forest: painted in acrylic ink on wood, this painting by Taisiia Cherkasova, exhibited among other fantasised memories at Galerie Dominique Fiat, caught our eye. What are these lighthouses telling us, marking the vanishing point […]
THE POETIC PAINTINGS OF CLEMENT DAVOUT
FRANCE – PARIS In the 6th arrondissement of Paris, the works of Clément Davout make their debut at the Ketabi Bourdet gallery. Baptised “Sous le ciel, sous le bleu” (under the sky, under the blue), the exhibition unveils new bucolic paintings in which nature expresses itself with gentleness. Clément Davout became passionate about painting in […]
PHOTOREALISM
PICTURE THIS ! England – London “When we look at a photorealistic painting, there’s a double image: we see both a painting and an image clearly derived from a photograph. The subject of [Don] Eddy’s painting [Private parking III, 1971, editor’s note], for example, is not a Volkswagen but a photograph of a Volkswagen. The […]
THE HYPERREALISTIC SCULPTURE, ENCORE!
Nantes – France At a time of transhumanist utopias and cosmetic surgery, how do we view our imperfect bodies? Born in the United States in the 1960s, hyper-realist sculpture is experiencing a resurgence of interest that raises questions: after the Musée Maillol and the Fondation Beyeler,1 it is now being honored at the Musée d’Arts […]
KIMSOOJA TO BREATH
Korean artist Kimsooja, invited by Galeries Lafayette to “inhabit” her historic dome, gave herself to a form of remembrance. Having chosen to dress it with a film diffracting light into rainbow spectra, it pays homage to Jaques Grüber, the great master glassmaker of Art Nouveau who, when the dome was built in 1912, had created […]
FIORENZA MENINI
Walk Man Walk like a Woman France – Montpellier There is no end to the work of feminist (or simply female) “artiviste.” Here is the one, elaborated in the New York of the 1990s and early 2000s, by Fiorenza Menini (born 1970). “A confusing score composed of walks, happenings, performances, texts, photographs and video” testifying […]
GREGORY OREKHOV, POST-MINIMALIST LAND ART
The installations of the Moscow artist draw on metaphorical images, geometric abstraction, pure forms, and lines, like “Red Vertical,” a tribute to Kasimir Malevitch. Gregory Orekhov followed in the footsteps of his father, a renowned sculptor and academician, learning techniques and materials in his studio before his untimely death at the age of 25. After […]
FRANÇOISE PETROVITCH : Between (d)them
“The world must be romanticized […] When I give common things an august meaning, usual realities a mysterious meaning, what is known the dignity of the unknown, the finite an air, a reflection, a glow of the infinite: I romanticize them,” wrote the pope of German Romanticism, Novalis, in 1798. Applied with varying degrees of […]
FIGURATIONS : Another art of today
Bodies, faces, sections of architecture, lines and signs… painted or sketched, sometimes erased or crossed out, the elements making up the canvases of Doria Jeridi (who has just graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris) collide on the empty canvas with an expressive force and a graphic power evoking the distortions and misalignments of Francis Bacon. […]
MICHEL FRANÇOIS
Against nature Blind Spot, Theater of Operations, Garden against Nature, Heterotopias, Scene of Abandonment, Exhibits: going from one twist to another, the artistic walk on which Michel François leads us, through a journey that looks like a “total work of art” or an anti-epic divided into chapters, is not a relaxing one. In the first […]
SIMON MARTIN : Evanescence / Florescence
Painting as an evanescence, a breath, a murmur, a memory, an apparition… It is such a florescence, a germination or a flux that, in its flows of blue, yellow, and pale roses, the painting of Simon Martin appears to us. “Here and there, repentances and drips, sub-layers and contours are left visible,” says Horya Makhlouf, […]
JOANNA PIOTROWSKA
Little “tales of ordinary madness Drawing from body language and the poetry of the absurd, the framework of Joanna Piotrowska’s multimedia practice is aimed at staging bodies under tension in artificial postures to bring out the violence of human relationships, oscillating from embrace to oppression. “Through photography, film and performance, Joanna Piotrowska points to […]
HAIR AND FUR
“O fleece […] O curls! […] Ecstasy!” Baudelaire, “La Chevelure”, Les Fleurs du mal. Depicted by so many poets as bewitching (“These hairs, these ties, with which my heart embraces you […] / Hold me so tightly […]”, wrote Ronsard in his Sonnets for Helen in 1578), hair has always been the primary element […]
PARIS DRAWING NOW COURSE PARIS
With its Insight and Process sectors dedicated to emerging artists, new experiences, and hybridizations (video, performatives, etc.), Drawing Now Art Fair, the small fair that has become the unmissable event of contemporary drawing, once again testified, at its 16th edition in March,1 the vitality of a medium that seems to be increasingly pushing its limits […]
ART PARIS ROUTE
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. […]
ICONS
Italy – Venice At the origins of the quarrel of the icons (the famous battle between the iconoclasts and the iconodules, having torn the Eastern Church in the 8th century), was the belief in the power of incarnation of the religious image and, consequently, the duty of veneration attached to the “holy images.” This “status […]
ROMAN HEAD IN MARBLE OF ZEUS-SERAPIS
Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) ascended the throne at the age of twenty. He began a military campaign very early on that would take him from Greece to Egypt, from Central Asia to northern India, and give birth to one of the greatest empires in history. In 332 BC, he invaded Egypt, where the oracle […]
NICOLAS DELPRAT, THE AMERICAN NIGHT
Paris – France Given in reference to the technique of filtering light used in the cinema to obtain a nocturnal atmosphere in scenes shot in broad daylight, the title of the new exhibition that the Maubert Gallery is devoting to Nicolas Delprat immediately plunges us into the very cinematographic atmosphere of this pictorial work focused […]
BASQUIAT x WARHOL
Paris – France After the success of the “Jean-Michel Basquiat” exhibition, seen by nearly 700,000 visitors in 2018, here is the shock duo – “Basquiat x Warhol” presented at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. A blockbuster bringing together some eighty of the one hundred and sixty canvases painted “four hands,” as well as individual works completed […]
DUNE VARELA, THE SCARS OF THE IMAGE
Torn, crumpled, sanded, lacerated, stitched images… Fragments, relics, vestiges… Intertwining the times of making the image, from its destruction to its metamorphosis, and merging the background (the subject) and the form in a process of surprising metonymic contamination (the content becoming a container), Dune Varela’s photographs create a perceptive disorder. Details of ancient statues printed […]
A PLEIN POUMONS
Lyon – France You had to be called Marcel Duchamp to dare to put the Air of Paris in a light bulb and offer it as a ready-made to his rich collector… More than a century later (it was in 1919), it is the Bullukian Foundation that invites us to “breathe” – A pleins poumons. […]
THE IRRESOLUTE
Indeterminacy has been defined by many artists and theorists as the vibrant heart of the “poetic act,” the stumbling block to “illumination.” “Nothing is more hostile to the concept of beauty than the desire to give the mind a determined form,” wrote Friedrich Schiller in the 18th century, while in the middle of the 19th […]