Exhibition IVIaking
Making and organising exhibitions for others is essential in the lives of artists. Exhibition IVIaking outlines a collaborative approach to conceptualising and organising solo or group shows, successively as a part of the teams at Silicon IVIalley, DOC!
DEMANDS & SUPPLIES
Matthieu Laurette
Silicon IVIalley
2018
On Italian Museography...
EPFL Studio Master I
Silicon IVIalley
Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
Pierre Joseph
DOC!
Ending Explained
ECAL Master of Arts HES-SO in Fine Arts
DOC!
2017
Road Rage
Christophe Lemaitre
DOC!
La Nuit juste avant les forêts
DOC!
BREAK (FEAST)
Lauren Coullard
Silicon IVIalley
So Leggere
Francesco Cagnin
DOC!
free time
Demelza Watts
Silicon IVIalley
2016
Guitars
Francis Baudevin
DOC!
Cluster
César Chevalier & Noémie Vulpian
Silicon IVIalley
Rob a Robe
DOC!
Suite
Nicolas Degrange
Silicon IVIalley
2015
1
Robin Lebey
Silicon IVIalley
Guitare, Tanpura & Tabla électronique
Myriam Stamoulis
Silicon IVIalley
CCI
Silicon IVIalley
DEMANDS & SUPPLIES
Matthieu Laurette
24.08—20.09.2020
Organised by Silicon IVIalley
Silicon IVIalley
Prilly, Switzerland
https://siliconmalley.ch/Matthieu-laurette
DEMANDS & SUPPLIES, Matthieu Laurette's first solo exhibition in Switzerland since 1999 at MAMCO in Geneva, will fill the space from floor to ceiling at Silicon Malley (2.5 x 4 meters [98 x 157.5 in]), an artist-run space hosting one visitor at a time due to the COVID-19 situation, and spread to an online sales website (www.demandsandsupplies.art), powered by Shopify™ that will be available worldwide.
Conceived as a retrospective, DEMANDS & SUPPLIES (2012—ongoing) picks up the story left off at the artist's eponymous exhibition in 2012 at Gaudel de Stampa in Paris. It presents a full financial disclosure of all costs and expenses incurred in the past eight years of Matthieu Laurette's practice as an artist.
‘Accumulator or otaku of Contemporary art, Matthieu Laurette is a demanding artist in the sense that he manages to integrate into his work all the elements or data that participate in the preparation, production, presentation, distribution, mediation, promotion and reception of his work.’ (1)
In contrast to Chris Burden, who made public his profit and loss (Full Financial Disclosure, 1977) as decorative "collages" of canceled checks, bank statements, tax forms which he called ‘drawings’ Matthieu Laurette is proposing since 2012, through a commercial arrangement, simple two-line contracts that allow his expenses to be acquired. Rather than producing or exhibiting a single material object, Matthieu Laurette generates financial ‘exhaust’ his bills and debts — to be paid for by collectors. Today anyone can become a collector on www.demandsandsupplies.art.
As the artist explained in a discussion with Seth Siegelaub in Frieze (2013): ‘DEMANDS & SUPPLIES, consists entirely of contracts — say, a contract that a collector could purchase the cost of my phone deals, the rent of my studio or have a dinner with me and stuff like that.’ (2)
Matthieu Laurette considers his basic artist’s expenses as production costs that are then doubled to define the selling price of the work, ranging from 207.66 euros for Matthieu Laurette’s 2015 mobile phone bills were purchased by ____________________________, up to 31,909.14 euros for the entirety of his 2019 expenses. These works, available for online order and on-site purchase at Silicon Malley, are unique printed contracts in A4 or US letter format (dimensions variable according to collector's location), which must be signed by both parties — the collector and the artist — to be then framed in an artist's frame (size: 37.5 x 29 x3.5 cm / 14.75 x 11.25 x 1.25 in). For more details, please contact us by email or visit the website: www.demandsandsupplies.art.
Postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis, this exhibition marks the celebration of Silicon Malley's 5th anniversary and its reopening after seven months. Even though Matthieu Laurette customarily omits biographical data in his work, the artist had suggested organizing the opening reception of the exhibition on the 24th of August 2020, the very day of his 50th birthday. The project, with a ‘physical’ exhibition at Silicon Malley in Switzerland and a year-long online shop accessible to all, remains exactly the same as planned in 2019 before the pandemic. The rescheduled presentation — now appearing alongside ‘Galleries and Art Fairs Online Viewing Rooms’ and ‘Institutions generating online content’ — further calls into question the transactional nature of online visibility and critiques the ‘outsideness’ of not-for-profit culture and artists-run spaces. In so doing, the artist lays bare the mechanisms of individual consumption and existence.
In 1993, when asked on a French TV game show called Tournez Manège [The Dating Game] to describe himself, Matthieu Laurette replied, ‘A multimedia artist.’ He has since been exploring the relationship between art and society with an œuvre that he characterizes as ‘IRL Institutional Critique.’ His body of work seeks to show inconsistencies or flaws in the systems imposed by late capitalism and Spectacle.
This project reduces an artistic work to the exhaustive list of expenses necessary to its own conception. Furthermore, it questions the value that any person, including the artist himself, can place on a work, including all that it can be brought to encompass, conceal, or even disguise. Reduced to an increasingly essential data for many artists — financial data — DEMANDS & SUPPLIES displays in an orderly sequence of A4 sheets of paper on the wall, a raw look at what is the lived reality of an artist today.
Silicon IVIalley, 2020
(1) Arthur Fouray, I do not wish to add more, 2020 in Actes du Colloque Vues & Données, to be published in September 2020, ENSP, France.
(2) Vivian Sky Rehberg, The Real World in Frieze, No.154, Apr. 2013.
Matthieu Laurette Biography
Matthieu Laurette (b. 1970) participated in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 curated by Harald Szeemann, and his work has been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim (1998), MoMA-PS1 (2005) and MoMA (2007) in New York, Stedelijk (2005) in Amsterdam, Castello di Rivoli (2001) in Turin, Mamco (1999) in Geneva, Palais de Tokyo (2003 & 2006) and the Pompidou Centre (1997, 2000, 2004, 2007 & 2009) in Paris. A retrospective of his work spanning over three decades will be held at MACVAL-Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (Vitry-sur-Seine) in 2022.
www.laurette.net
@matthieulaurette
www.demandsandsupplies.art
On Italian museography, but refrained to the site of BBPR’s Castello Sforzesco. Expressed via the means of Hans Hollein's inspired axonometries and Giotto-styled renderings with the attributes of various scale models. The whole is held togetter within the maze of a small scale private chapel.
Koenraad Dedobbeleer
Antonios Prokos
David Viladomiu
Lerna Bagdjian
Eric Bonhôte
Lois Bouche
Svenja Clausen
Noé Cuendet
Vincent Dorfmann
Florent Dubois
Floriane Fol
Fanny Frykberg Wallin
Alexandra Fuchs
Eva Hürlimann
Valentine Jaques
Valdrin Jashari
Daniela Lopes Peñaloza
Nina Mosca
Marion Moutal
Philippine Radat
Germán Ribera Marín
Valentine Robin
Felix Spangenberg
Constance Steinfels
Annabelle Thüring
18.12.2018—18.01.2019
An exhibition of the program Italians Did It Better by Koenraad Dedobbeleer at EPFL Studio Master I organised with Silicon IVIalley
Silicon IVIalley
Prilly, Switzerland
https://siliconmalley.ch/Italians-Did-It-Better
The ambition to explore the possible contrasts and interactions between serious architectural practice and contemporary art drives the energies converged during the exhibition On Italian Museography… This project bridges an EPFL research unit directed by Koenraad Dedobbeleer (a prototypal architectural firm) named Italians did it better, with an artist-run space, Silicon Malley, overseen by a group of artists in Lausanne. The outcome is a multi-layered exploration and amalgamation of two distinct reflective spaces.
Contemporary artists, due to the proliferation of ‘artist-run-spaces’ and the surge of small international galleries, have grown accustomed to working outside deliberately-designed architectural contexts, such as museums, foundations, art centers, and other institutional settings. Only the elite of this corporate ensemble have the opportunity to engage spatially with the architectures of their era. Architecture, in contrast, is most often showcased in exhibition contexts in a format that leans more towards a presentation rather than an exhibition itself. The collective aspiration to present this architectural exhibition in a space almost devoid of any architectural concept reconnects with a pragmatic democratisation of contemporary interrelations between art and architecture. The curation of this exhibition by Koenraad Dedobbeleer, an artist whose theoretical endeavours constantly oscillate between these two cultural spheres, facilitates a gentle and balanced discursive exchange, respecting the diverse cultures represented. Like its underlying structure or script, it unveils its intentions through a nested series reminiscent of Russian dolls, enabling a kaleidoscopic concentration on the academic study of the exhibition’s architectural devices. The bibliography established during the project’s development delves into these exhibition systems still largely uncharted history.
The self-titled exhibition of Herzog and de Meuron at the Centre Pompidou in 1995, co-curated by Remy Zaugg, stands as the manifest theoretical legacy of On Italian Museography… Orchestrated by an artist and his two assistant architects, Antonios Prokos and David Viladomiu, it stems from a synergy that elicits a focused, scholarly, and open investigation – specifically, an analysis and reinterpretation by Master of Architecture students regarding museum layouts created by a group of Italian architects between the 1950s and 1970s. The focal point narrows further, centring on BBPR’s iconic Castello Sforzesco (1954–1956), a hallmark of this architectural corpus. Detailed and succinct, the design of the museum’s internal spaces amalgamates the quintessential elements of these canonical presentations of European cultural legacy – in this case, a collection predominantly comprised of works from the Quattrocento, representing Italian history and the Flemish Renaissance.
This research manifests as a studiolo, a recursive representation of the exhibition space, resembling an inverted cabinet which, for each of its openings, offers a perspective, an axonometry, and a model, each corresponding to a student’s project. The inner appearance of this furniture, evoking a chapel, is adorned with a sequential display of renderings inspired by Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Church of Padua (1303–1306). This nod to the work of the artist, regarded as the progenitor of perspective in painting, forges an evident connection between artistic and architectural subjectivity. It also visually imprints a fascination akin to the order of the orthodox icon towards the classical art museum within a contemporary presentation setting, opposing any grandeur or splendour. This yet-to-be-resolved contradiction, a query directed at the observer and the visitor, frames the present-day interplays between student or professional and artistic or architectural practices, which we are tasked to invigorate.
Arthur Fouray
Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
Pierre Joseph
08.09—07.10.2018
Curated by Arthur Fouray
DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/pierre-joseph-fondation-vincent-van-gogh-arles-doc/
Press release
Pierre_Joseph_Fondation_Vincent_van_Gogh_Arles_DOC.pdf
Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu
Pierre Joseph (born 1965 in Caen, lives and works in Paris) shares at DOC a simple story. The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles exhibition positions itself in the tradition of the rural life scenes painted in the 19th century by Vincent van Gogh and Jean-Francois Millet. Following the Hypernormandie exhibition at La Galerie Noisy-le-Sec in 2016, the artist explores the almost science-fiction continuation of the Impressionists’ work.
He hijacks the keywords and labels, confusing everything while clarifying the themes of his solo exhibition. He plays with the codes of a hierarchical technological society with normative mythologies obsessed by an organic, natural ideal. He notably focused on the exhibition La Vie Simple – Simply Life/Songs of Alienation by Bice Curiger and Julia Marchand at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in 2018. La Vie Simple seeks to decipher artists’ relationship with a lifestyle in harmony with nature. Moving from a real context to a temporary exhibition, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles sets the tone.
Are we on rue du Docteur Fanton or rue du Docteur Potain ? This keyword shift, here a ground shift, leads us into a potato field. A 21st-century version of a potato field. Storage, industrial display of potatoes, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles takes us to an aisle in Rungis. This presentation, almost communist in the deliberate consistency of the photographs and their subject, conveys the idea of a simple potato, devoid or rather peeled of all qualifiers. A few sprouts here and there, and the pinkish hue of their film sometimes punctuate the dry soil surrounding them. In this cosmos of potatoes, the tiny details are so many anchor points to return to and emphasise a simple truth: they are potatoes.
How to simplify the message of any political, social, ideological, or historical issue to arrive at expressing the humble object ‘potato’? Pierre Joseph delves into the perspective of a simple potato. Re-discovering the direct and trivial attitude 19th-century painters might have had while painting peasants, fields, meals, and still lifes. The task is not so straightforward with such an overflow of current information. One only needs to search for the hashtags ‘#potato’, ‘#potatoes’ (and all their variants, including in Esperanto) on social networks or search engines to realise the richness and diversity of the starch’s visual vocabulary. The exhibition, moreover, is constructed with and thanks to the potato. From the starch that fixes the image on film to the starch glue binding the forty-five ‘endless photographs’ to the DOC wall. It is about narrowing the vocabulary to discern precise categories and clear intentions.
The potato, seriality, contextual shift. All these components mix and naturally constitute the exhibition experience in an extended spatio-temporal framework. Today or in 10 years, here or elsewhere, Pierre Joseph presents us with a living ecosystem that has evolved since the project’s inception, expressed during the exhibition’s duration, and will change tomorrow with time.
Arthur Fouray
Jean–François Millet accesses history’s arena by many entries. The most famous comes from Vincent van Gogh, who devotes a fraternal, even paternal worship to Millet (1). In this complete and surprising lineage, a ‘nineteenth–century look’ appears in the colour ‘translation’ from the Dutch painter. This look is focused on images, which start being industrialised and coloured in front of the stingy eyes of newcomers, collectors and connoisseurs, among which reigns the van Gogh pair – Vincent and Théo. The last is pegged to one of the vital parts behind the new pictures’ culture, which gradually settles during the second half of the XIXth century. The Goupil House, as others, feeds its enthusiasts with photographic copies and luxurious coloured engravings. Reproductions, drawings, originals, they parade between fingers of our dear Vincent, soon aspiring artist, who decides then to refine his eyes at the heart of image making (2). From London in 1874, he writes and answers to the passion surrounding L’Angélus (1857–1859). Also a pleased victim of ‘Aura’s migration’ (3), van Gogh experiences the masterpiece through the many reproductions that conform to the new uses of fresh collectors. A picture for each and for all those who love to free images from portfolios to spread them across salon’s walls. On a simple card, between two glasses, or simply pinned, the reproduction shows off its new powers and narrates the glory of photomechanical processes (4). These popular hangings foretell a ‘pop’ (5) sensibility and fever that culminates, a century later, in the Anglo–Saxon’s world. This boiling world of images moulds a ‘nineteenth–century look’ that welcomes the countryside’s wealthy man, the peasant–painter, Gruchy’s native and School of Barbizon’s regular.
Jean–François Millet is a man of his time, skilled at handling pre–programs and tricks. In his own way, he engages in media celebrity, through, among others, a postcard. From 1863, he authorises the reproduction and diffusion of L’homme à la houe and modulates the palette of his paintings with the help of their photographic copies. The by–product dictates the original in this mail orders’ game. The image has to be seductive at first glance. The new works available to purchase from the French territory display an assumed contrast and a silhouette’s play for the one observing from the United States. Millet is known to Americans. His brother lives there and generates for him an ongoing platform thanks to pre–sale photographs. The man from the fields is a man of his time, of its expectations, and of its pre–sales, even of its turmoils which would drag him to the hectic flows of small and major History. The ‘peasant’s painter’ lost some strings.
His outdoor work gestures put up the perfect green screen for those who like to see a rural France nostalgia in the wake of France’s defeat in 1870 (6) – a lowliness sometimes tinted with arrogance in the peasant’s demeanours (7), or even the exact reverse: a politically unstable small nation. Towards this catalogue of fantasies, Millet claims a non–political work that treats the peasant’s class with realism and kindness. The ‘nineteenth–century look’ is paired with a ‘native look’ that depicts rurality from within: a pioneer of the ‘rural informing’. One of his most famous paintings – L’Angélus – vacates France with great fanfare due to an important opinion warp going public during the sale on July 1st, 1889. Kneaded from different wishes against the mysterious painting, the government cannot find an agreement to keep the artwork on its land. L’Angélus leaves for the other side of the Atlantic, leading to
a national loss feeling and shared humiliation. The picture returns as a palliative care : edited and distributed in large numbers, prints are scattered throughout the French territory, complementing the illustrations’ panel already circulating between fingers of our dear Vincent. ‘Migration’s Aura’ helps to dry the national tears while the two peasants, the bell tower and their small harvest move on to the Louvre in 1909. Does it make its myth tragic (8) ? It is, at the very least, caustic, mechanical and resolutely modern, abundant and pre–pop.
Julia Marchand
(1) Vincent van Gogh, n° 493 letter (Nuenen, 1885) ‘Millet, he’s Millet the father, which means he’s a guide & advisor for young painters.’
(2) Goupil’s house business unit in London
(3) Latour B., Lowe A., 2011. ‘Aura’s migration or how to explore an original via its facsimile’ in Intermédialités n° 17 Spring 2011 pp. 173–205
(4) Renié, P–L., 2006. ‘The Image on the Wall: Prints as Decoration in Nineteenth–Century Interiors’ in Nineteeth–Century Art Worldwide [Online] http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn06/49-autumn06/autumn06article/156-the-image-on-the-wall-prints-as-decoration-in-nineteenth-century-interiors [viewed on June the 22nd 2017].
(5) For further information, see Van Gogh : Pré–pop symposium acts initiated by Bice Curiger, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles Art Director, 2017
(6) see Georgel, C., ‘The Peasant gets into history’, HPI [Online] https://www.histoire-image.org/fr/etudes/paysan-entre-histoire [viewed on June the 15th 2017].
(7) ‘Baudelaire thinks Millet’s humility is close to pride : His peasants are prigs who have a too high self esteem. They spread a fatal, dark, drowsiness which urges me to hate them.’ Quote by Isolde Pludermacher in ‘L’Angélus de Millet : du souvenir personnel à la mémoire collective’ in Millet (exhibition publication), Palais des Beaux–Arts de Lille, 2018. p. 40
(8) Salvador Dali the tragical myth of ‘L’Angélus de Millet’, paranoïa–critic lecture, Paris, Jean–Jacques Pauvert, 1963.
Potatoes Love Treaty
Our first culinary thrills were with you. Do you remember?
As children, we devoured you as mashed potatoes on Sunday noon. You were named Amandine, and once on our plates, we would carve a well in your centre to pour in the juice of our roast.
A few years later, when we were at the age to fry you, you adopted the name Charlotte. Luckily for us, during the time of our first encounter in 2011, you lost your license and became free. No more royalties paid to the giants of this world. You had just turned thirty and could finally enjoy a bit of tranquillity. Now, you are free to embrace any farmer, provided he treats you with tenderness.
In April, you experience his caresses before he buries you under a soft bed of soil. Often, you remain hidden there for over four months. Sometimes, early in June, you grant us the privilege of tasting your flesh. Your skin is then so delicate that a mere touch is enough to peel you. Cooking you is child’s play.
Then comes the end of summer; your skin is toughened by the sun and rainless days. It then becomes more challenging to retrieve you. We might have to dig and try up to three times before we can hold you again. Yet, you are less slender than before. Your curves are more pronounced.
In a few months, the days of your beauty will be past. Your skin will wrinkle. You will begin to show your claws, ready to depart. You prepare for the grand journey, one that will reunite you with the love of your life, the earth. The very one that lives, breathes, and sustains us all.
We’ve grown accustomed to your fleeting nature. We never part in anger, for you never truly leave us.
Your sisters are there to comfort us. They, too, are free, and we will have all the time to cherish them. Anaïs, Bernadette, Blanche, Désirée… Why savour the same one every day when nature is so diverse?
By Norbert Nicolet (farmer, La Ferme ô VR, Annoville) and Jill Cousin (gastronomic journalist), lovers and enthusiasts of all potatoes: white, pink, purple, to mash, to nurture for hours in a pot, or to fry in hot oil. What matters is that the large agricultural cooperatives no longer bind them, and we can savour them as much as we wish.
Pierre Joseph
Born in 1965 in Caen. Lives & works in Paris.
Since the late ’80s, Pierre Joseph’s work has focused on issues of his presence. He began his artistic practice with collective projects in collaboration with Philippe Perrin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, and Bernard Joisten. He first gained recognition with Les Ateliers du Paradise, the now-historical inaugural exhibition held at Air de Paris in Nice in 1990. In the early ’90s, he began his series of ‘characters to reactivate’, derived from contemporary mythologies (examples include Superman, Snow White, a policeman, and Pris Stratton from Blade Runner). These characters are present during the exhibition’s opening and can be subsequently reactivated using documentary photography.
After a 3-month trip to Japan in 1997, he shifted his focus to the concept of learning. In the ’00s, he developed a keen interest in the theme of his disappearance. More recently, he has been blending keywords and superimposing layers of content. His most recent solo exhibition at Air de Paris in January 2018 featured photographs that resemble the watercolours of botanist Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Pierre Joseph thus merges the hashtags associated with both of their visual practices.
Pierre Joseph has exhibited widely in Europe and internationally. His works are part of collections at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Van Abbe Museum, and numerous private collections. Recent exhibitions include those at Le Consortium, MAC/VAL, Dallas Biennial, Centre Pompidou Metz, Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, LUMA Westbau, and Swiss Institute.
Ending Explained
Anaïs Aik
Will Benedict
Daniele Bonini
Stefania Carlotti
Loucia Carlier
Sara Cavicchioli
Raquel Dias
Caterina De Nicola
Pauline Forté
Emilie Fradella
Magdalena Froger
Charlie Gay
Catherine Heeb
Lorenza Longhi
Léa Jullien
Mandine Knöpfel
Una Björg Magnúsdóttir
Julie Monot
Agathe Naito
Jérôme Pfister
Alessandro Polo
Marco Rigoni
Hélène Spycher
Jeanne Wéry
17.03 — 09.04.2018
An exhibition organised by Will Benedict with the students of the Master's program from ECAL/Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL Master of Arts HES-SO in Fine Arts — EAE European Art Ensemble).
DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/ending-explained/
https://ecal.ch/fr/feed/events/1195/ending-explained/
Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu
‘In contrast to designers, artists have a more ambiguous relationship to efficiency. In design the primary condition of production is the client. But who does the artist work for and to what end? The collector? The audience? Humans? The market regulates the practical and emotional realities of this classic division rather poorly. The market does a lot rather poorly. 50 or 100 years ago artists, designers, performers, writers and poets attempted to breakdown some of the more arbitrary distinctions that hold a genre together. Today we cling to them in the midst of Brexit and Trump; Angela Merkel is our hero and the French have finally decided to take their flirtation with neoliberalism to the next level. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.’
WIll Benedict
A program by Arthur Fouray
Road Rage
Christophe Lemaitre among Mimosa Echard, Kim Farkas, Aurélien Mole
25.11—17.12.2017
Organised by Corentin Canesson, Arthur Fouray & Eva Vaslamatzi
DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/driver-angst-christophe-lemaitre/
Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu
Acknowledgements: Garance Chabert, Arthur Fouray, Julien Jassaud, Alexis Tolmatchev, la Villa du Parc (Centre d’art contemporain)
La Nuit juste avant les forêts
Carlotta Bailly-Borg
Benjamin Husson
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Flora Moscovici
Rallou Panagiotou
20.10—12.11.2017
Organised by Corentin Canesson, Lucas Erin, Arthur Fouray & Eva Vaslamatzi
DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/la-nuit-juste-avant-les-forets/
Photographs: Paul Nicoué
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu
a man is getting prepared
he puts on the Soir de Paris fragrance
to go out on the woods again
“Another hard day in the jungle
Another hard day in the zoo”
He is a dealer, a murderer, a brother, a sinner
he is totally a Koltès character
Across the city that he leaves in his wake
he is waiting for someone
his possible victim
The one that will show him immediately his true face,
that will reveal secrets, never told even to his closest friends
Someone that although had planned to go from point A to point B
changed his mind
and stopped in the middle to meet him
The world outside is cruel
just as the inside
and the forest-jungle-zoo looking city
seems now at the time of night/evening/dusk
just like the right place to be.
Eva Vaslamatzi
BREAK (FEAST)
Lauren Coullard
15.09—12.11.2017
Organised by Silicon IVIalley
Silicon IVIalley
Prilly, Switzerland
https://siliconmalley.ch/Lauren-Coullard
Photographs: Frédéric Gabioud, Paul Nicoué (editing)
Lauren Coullard: The Lucky Stories
Sometimes we’re lucky, sometimes small unforeseen miracles happen in the sinuous course of life. One of these was my meeting with Lauren Coullard, and almost immediately afterwards with her art, at about the exact moment it was starting to get born. Shortly then a new miracle - these were sumptuous times : Lauren Coullard started to paint. Suddenly, on the table, as airdroped from an invisible country where these sort of serene fireworks had been nicely waiting to hatch, Lauren Coullard’s first paintings. Just like that.
If the world was paying more attention to what matters, it would have done the same thing as we did: watch, admire, silently applause, and whisper our admiration, carefully making sure that she was not hearing too much, to let her do what she does best: paint, without listening to anybody’s opinion, because the truth is that no one has anything to tell her about what she should or should not to do. After all, she's an artist.
The following months and years have been and keep being a long way of recurring delights, everytime appear the modest and zigzagging epiphanies of joy, color, and personal narrative patterns rising with more or less density depending on the periods: characters in nature, human activities, vegetations, a few horses, or brillantly talented portraits that deconstruct the human face to rebuild it with only what amuses or intrigues the painter, resulting in small wonders of relevance, humor, pictorial accuracy and vital energy. Or recently, abstract signs on splendid large size canvas, made of color, peace and joy, quick like scribbles, but with the perfection of color harmonies.
Because, in fact, the supposed antinomy between abstraction and figuration, as some oppose body and soul, besides being a tremendous reduction of the reality of painting, finds one more proof with Coullard that in the end, whether you recognize people or apples or cats in it, or you only see lines and tones, it is always, more or less, stories that are told or that fly around, with some more obvious and some more subtle. Which is why sometimes everything finds itself mixed up with everything, boundaries get blurred by the brush, we see something, and what is it? Well finally it is color, it’s movement, oil paint, a brush stroke: nothing more, and nothing less.
Stories, she has plenty, and today she’s telling us one more at Silicon: in BREAK(FEAST), we are, you are, in a cereal bowl! And following a daydreaming reference to eighteenth century’s porcelain bowls having decorative patterns painted on the inside, here comes a beautiful wall frieze with dragons, as seen from inside this very bowl. And then, because a daydream bounces on one another, arise the memories of Mexican cereal boxes: photos of the Mexican boxes are printed and then pasted on the French ones, these collages are painted, and voilà: cereal boxes in the big cereal bowl, paintings in the installation, or maybe just a large painting that is also a large cereal bowl. Daydream’s pool ball bounces again on an elegance phantasy about the nineteenth century, catches sight of Dorian Gray, and here it is: Wilde’s hero’s taking his breakfast, or has taken it earlier, or maybe he is just about to take it - anyway, look right here: embroidered with his initials, he kindly left us his napkin.
The little ballet is in place, it is up to us now to dance.
Jérémie Gransenne
So Leggère
Francesco Cagnin
29.04—21.05.2017
Organised by DOC! Expositions
So Leggère is the first solo show of Francesco Cagnin in Paris. He presents an installation thought and conceived for DOC! and guides the spectator’s wandering in various reading’s way, poetics and spatial.
Francesco Cagnin (born 1988 in Italy) lives and works in Zurich.
DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/so-leggere/
Photographs: Paul Nicoué
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu
When Francesco told me about the installation he was developing for his exhibition, he used the metaphor of the ‘light lunch.’ Words are lighter than objects, and floating words are lighter than statements. Is therefore his an exhibition that doesn’t make any statement? I mean, is it even possible to conceive an exhibition as such, an exhibition that doesn’t make statements? You say: ‘he’s so mental,’ because at the end of the day this is cryptic. You say: ‘he’s so anal,’ because everything is so straight and the brainchild of a technophile. You say: ‘he’s so dull.’ Still Francesco is light, these bands being the ropes of a high-wire walker. He wove words into ropes, so to donate them substance, and a function, without resorting to their meaning.
One could say this is concrete poetry. I say: forget pragmatics, forget syntax, forget semantics. Read, but because while reading you move. ‘Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form—it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form!—and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity.’ I quote these words from the novel I am reading. I read them today on the bus, standing in balance, hieratically. Balance is the skill you need to oppose uncertainty. ‘Treading a fine line’ they say when you endanger your balance. And so comes vertigo, and so comes the fall.
This exhibition gives you the chance to test your balance. So squeeze your belly and walk on the wires, walk on the words. You’re very light, you’re almost floating. Enjoy vertigo, don’t fear falling. Don’t fear at all. Last night I watched a documentary about students demonstrations in 1970s Italy. A woman, an adorable pothead, uttered: ‘Too often words represent a moving away from the belly. I want my belly back! I want to feel it! I want to feel it along with all the bellies that are here! I can’t stand brain anymore! I don’t want it anymore!’ Francesco cares about his belly, and about your belly too. That’s why he put together a light show.
Michele D’Aurizio