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Dynasty

I liked a few pieces at the current Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ Palais de Tokyo showcase of young french art stars. At the MAM, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC et le Palais de Tokyo, Théo Mercier’s resin/pasta sculpture, Le solitaire, was a more humanized version of Michel Blazy’s piece, Patman 2. Sad and hilarious, the stooped sphaghetti haired overweight “figure”, so completely out of place seemed like the loneliest creature in the world despite being a caricature of a caricature.

Yuhsin U. Chang’s Poussière installations were impressive stalactites created from the dust collected in both institutions’ air vents. The juxtaposition of monstrous, organic, forms with this potentially toxic, almost weightless, blend of materials in these  pieces created a poetic on our relationship to material reality.

Antoine Dorotte’s engravings on Zinc, particularly, Blow, at the Palais de Tokyo, caught my eye for their combination of graphic impact and minute technical detail. The works play with scale and encourage the viewer’s eye meander over the work in a meditative manner.

Dynasty is up through September.

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.

3 Good Things to See

So I usually go to Palais de Tokyo more to drink Japanese beer and people watch at the vernissages  than to actually admire new work. While I have enjoyed a few of the former exhibitions (Michel Blazy. Michel Blazy. Michel Blazy…), most of the time I leave the shows slightly disappointed (“Who decided that thing deserves anyone’s attention?!?).

Fortunately, the current selection has a few standouts. Franziska Furter’s Squall Lines are impressive, intricate fibrous miniature sculptures installed against clean white walls (the organic forms seem to be created entirely out of crochet knots). Her other, larger, installation of broken glass under carpet was both subtle (you didn’t know at first why the floor creaked and cracked underfoot), participatory (I jumped from side to side as if I had bubble wrap underfoot), and poetic (ahh, the metaphors… the glass ceiling, museums as glass houses…). While most of Raphael Zarka’s work was completely overblown, his sculpture, La Draisine, was both completely absurd (a “vehicle” built from two vintage motorcycles attached to each other, facing opposite directions) and impressive in scale and whimsy. Finally, Serge Spitzer’s huge tubular installation provided a captivating physical metaphor for the movement of information within a network of gates and passageways. The shows are up until early May 2010.

Ryoji Ikeda at Le Laboratoire

The form of Ryoji Ikeda’s show with mathematician Benedict Gross, V!=L, echoes the content of the works presented. Despite a paucity of works on displays, Ikeda conjures up our ambiguous relationship with the infinite; on one hand we try to symbolize it, on the other the task is inherently impossible. I really enjoyed the installation in the first room, where two oversized sheets of paper recorded on one hand, the third largest prime number discovered so far, and on the other, an irrational number that runs on for as many digits, until it is (necessarily, prematurely) terminated. This juxtaposition led me to meditate on the relationship between finitude and creation.

http://www.lelaboratoire.org/