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55e Salon de Montrouge

I checked out this yearly emerging artists show in the suburbs and found work that sparked my curiosity, some clever one liners, and a lot of work that I was highly ambivalent about. The jury seems to privilege works that includes sexual innuendo or dead stuffed animals (note to self for my app. for next year…), though it is hard to generalize since there was quite a range of artists selected.

I liked Nicolas Durand’s installation, in which it wasn’t clear where the work (which included metal pipes lining the wall) began and where it ended. The show’s winner, Aymeric Ebrard showed an installation that consisted of found objects, fabricated elements, and prints. I wasn’t crazy about the marché aux puces stuff but I liked the golden key, and the last print. The key was literally multiplied upon itself- the object’s reflection was given physical form and attached to the object. When displayed the new object forced the viewer to do a double take upon realizing that the key’s supposed reflection was an actual object. Kirill Ukolov’s Sans Titre, 2010 plastic molds of an antique bust were a little repetitive of work I’ve seen elsewhere, but they were really really well displayed on white pedestals of varying sixes.

FIAC ‘09

I really enjoyed Frédérique Lucien’s drawing, Orée, 2008. Lucien’s large, poetic, simple forms of human lips are entirely covered with a thick layer of charcoal. In a simple, soft gesture, this medium delicately spills over the lower edge of the lips, whetting the viewer’s appetite. Another work, Recycle, by Blokhim and Kuznetsov addresses our embodiment in a more direct manner, in a cast plastic sculpture that fuses together a meditating body and a trash container. This juxtaposition would have been more effective in a public, outdoor setting or if the sculpture was shown in a series cast multiple times.

Gilles Saussier’s photo,Living in the Fringe 1995-1996 both attracts the viewer’s attention and simultaneously blocks his gaze. We are invited to be voyeurs, staring at the side of an old man’s face from a close, personal distance. The man pays us no heed. We want to get closer but the surface of the image; slightly blurry, slightly grainy, lacking smooth transitions between highlights and the rest of the man’s skin, reminds us of the boundaries of our ability to truly see another.

Darren Almond’s Night+Fog (Norilsk) 5, bromide prints from 2007 present a negative of grouping of trees shot in black and white. The white lines of the scraggly tree trunks resemble human neurons and lead the viewer to ponder the symmetry across scales of different kinds of living forms in nature.

Louise Unger’s Kokoro was a nice smaller piece of soft sculpture (in delicate steel chain mail) resembling a transparent model of an organic form resembling both a human heart and a pair of breasts. The work swayed lightly in the breeze, creating an interesting tension between the pulsating movements associated with such forms and the tightly constructed, neatly finished, format of the piece.

Joseph Havel’s, “Mention it to the Moon” was a gorgeous piece created by stacking identical clothing labels from side to side in a clear plastic case. The simple, wave-like forms of the stack of labels become slightly chaotic and uncontrolled and undermine the regularity of the labels themselves.

Havel

Anne Koskinen (Galerie Anhava), showed a few sculptures in bronze that toyed with notions of the life and death of portraiture. Her metal casts of a canvas were rather clever and I enjoyed the polished surface of her self-portrait that reflected the faces of viewers back onto them.

Zoë Mendelson, Matali Crasset, and Jean-Pierre Bertrand

I liked Zoë Mendelson’s small collages at galerie schleicher + lange, although I wasn’t as crazy about the larger drawing on paper and “collage objects.” They have an intimate, playful, puzzle-like quality (particularly due to the use of “craft materials” … the odd pom pom and the like…) and staring at them is a cross between trying to figure out a rebus and appreciating the simple repetition of certain shapes in various parts of the image. My only complaint is that the drawings are always backed by a sheet of white paper with other media glued on it and I think it would be interesting for the layering process to go both ways (ie more drawing on top of collaged elements, etc.) I don’t think having a stable “backdrop” of somerset (?) makes much sense with the internal logic of the images.

Otherwise, I pretty much hated everything at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac… Fashion shows? Buy your painting on a string? Gag me… The only redeeming feature was a video, Living Wood, by Matali Cresset that reminded me of a sketch for an Urban Development project by Magdalena Abakanowicz that I saw a number of years ago. Growing, plant-like utopian architecture…. nice (on the other hand, her sculptures were bad)! There’s also a nice video in Jean-Pierre Bertrand’s show at Galerie Michel Rein- I wasn’t familiar with his work and and especially enjoyed seeing images of his earlier minimalist paintings on and under glass- at once clean and organic studies of the texture of paint on nontraditional surfaces (Salt paper, honey paper)…

Italian Futurism in Paris (Pompidou Center)

Le Futurisme à Paris, Centre Pompidou, up until January 29th

Liked:

The vast quantity of original texts and manifestos. The works (especially in the “Influence of Futurism on Russia” room (althouth the relevance of said room to “Futurism in Paris” is dubious)

Questioned:

The narrative arc of the show (Futurism and Cubism were two completely different schools of thought that eventually reconciled and melded together to form Orphism)

Disliked:

Only one sound installation? Very little photographic documentation of the key moments/artists involved in the movement