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Anish Kapoor au Grand Palais

I loved this year’s Monumenta! Kapoor’s temporary Installation made me appreciate  the contrast between the organic forms of the piece and the ornate oversized wrought iron greenhouse that is the Grand Palais. The red color of the piece (and subsequent red light inside) resembles an interior of a body cavity. I gasped as I entered this space, which was a completely unexpected disguise covering the bustling hall that I knew well from art fairs/trade shows, from within. The scale of the piece is overwhelming but the feeling of the piece is completely at odds with Serra’s rigid steel walls from a couple years back. The skin of the piece is like a living, breathing organism. Touching the pvc, we can feel the subtle vibrations of others touching the piece from the outside (reminding me of Gormley’s Blinding Light) and imagine the continuous stream of hot air flowing inside to hold the edifice up. The sculpture is architecture and anti-architecture all at once.

Leviathan, Anish Kapoor, Manifesta 2011, Grand Palais

Horror and Desire: Tous Cannibales

I caught a great show at the Maison Rouge this past week. Sadly, it’s already over, but after finally making it to this great space, I’m sure that I’ll be heading back down,on a regular basis. The show was really well curated; both the selection of artists and the mise en place displayed a fine sensibility and desire to tease out various interpretations of the larger theme of Cannibalism that held the show together. I really enjoyed illustrations by Marcel Dzama and Ralf Ziervogel (DD, 2003-4), a superb photo by Vik Muniz (Saturn devouring one of his sons, after Francisco de Goya, 2005), and a video in Chiharu Shiota’s individual show, in the adjunct exhibition space (Wall, 2010). John Isaacs’ abject sculpture, The Matrix of Amnesia (1997) epitomized the attraction and repulsion that governed much of the work chosen for the show; a huge headless blob of a body puddles on the ground at the viewers’ feet. The site is shocking because the rolls of fat beckon us to look at a body at once alive and in the process of decomposing. At the same time, the open hole at the sculpture’s “neck” shocks the viewer into averting her gaze.

Gilles Barbier, Emmental Head, 2003

Tosani, Gormley, l’été arrive!

Last thursday, I saw a great show by the artist Patrick Tosani at the In Situ Gallery. The works, large format photographs of massive quantities of paint covering architectural maquettes, made me think of James Casebere meets Pierrick Sorin’s facade painting projection installation from Nuit Blanche in 2008. The tenstion between the pop-like bright colors and shiny surface of the paint (and the photograph) and the sloppy/dribbling/descructive/ruinous nature of the paint’s progress in the fictitious environment puts the viewer in an uncomfortable position. The shoddy yet precise models of anonymous buildings exist only for these photographs yet we are not sure they they have been smeared with (bled upo by?) thick globs of enamel in lively colors. The works are aesthetic yet unsettling; I love the thick, evident materiality of the objects represented, but I feel torn leaving them with the admonition, “you can look but you can’t (ever) touch.”

Other good shows up at the moment include Antony Gormley at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (I LOVE the polyhedron figures, both the wire frame and full, cast, versions… but the small miniatures upstairs made me thing he’d either had a brief love affair with Giacometti or many recent flashbacks to a childhood spent playing with transformers), the group shows at Galerie Eric Mircher and the new White Project et Street Biennale next door, and the group show UPSTAIRS at Perrotin (not NOT any of the stuff downstairs). I was surprised to see several photos I really liked at the latter including James Welling’s “Mystery #13,” Jason Loebs’ “Untitled (Ned Led say sorry) 1-5″ series, and Mariah Robertson’s flashy “14.”

ArtParis and Marcel Gähler

I have a love/hate relationship with art fairs… On one hand it’s an efficient way to see a lot of different work and to gauge larger trends in the contemporary art market, on the other, there’s too much to take in and it’s almost impossible to concentrate enough on the few pieces that stick out from the rest.

Nevertheless, highlights from this year’s edition of ArtParis were Lionel Sabatté’s Wolf created out of clumps of dust apparently collected from the Paris Metro and attached to a steel armature. The piece was pretty hilarious in the context of an art fair filled with glamor and diamond studded price tags; Sabatté gave us a wild animal sitting calmly indoors under the glass roof of the Grand Palais. The piece used an unsightly material that is regularly removed from the public sphere, and the curiosity of onlookers towards dust would be dismissed in any other context, made me smile.

I also liked Renate Rampazzi’s suggestive abstract paintings that toe the line between depicting paint bleeding from one patch of color to another, and lightly suggesting figurative orifices (it’s too bad that Galleria Marino’s installation of her work encouraged a pop reading of these delicate images). Emmanuel Régent had some great, suggestive, ballpoint pen drawings at the ILOVEMYJOB stand and I hope to see more of his work. My favorite painting was a mesmerizing piece by Roman Lipski (Untitles, 2009, 130 x 200 cm) at Atlas Sztuki. The muted colors and the artists’ layering of lines and swathes of colors created an image both abstract and decidedly representative. The ambiguous nature of the site depicted makes the viewer wonder about just what is being depicted and where we find ourselves, in the space of the image. My phone camera image doesn’t do justice to the subtle browns and vaguely veridian greens of the field in the image…

Untitled, Roman Lipski, 2009

On Saturday, I came across a gem of a show of tiny drawings by Marcel Gähler at Galerie Jean Roch Dard. The delicate images in graphite on paper are only a few centimeters across on either side, and most depict screen showing a variety of images on television. The intimate scale of what appear to be mass media images draw attention to the blurry line between private and public life. The artist shows us how a public act can inspire a private moment of reflexion and makes something banal both exquisite and beautiful.

Seth Price at Chantal Crousel

I was initially drawn to this show for a pretty simple reason; I too had a (ongoing?) “rope phase,” in which I made artworks based on combining ropes with other forms and materials. Price’s work vacillates between extending the medium in a poetic, suggestive direction and collaging materials together in a way that can only be termed, “trashy.” I don’t mean this in a bad way; he plays with high and low and whereas many of the pieces in the show have a slapped together feel, they’re all active, lively objects which resonate with the energy of the act of making something new. Price explores different metaphors for rope and line, mixing together vector images of scanned drawings, thermoformed plastic, and plastic ropes. Some pieces loosely suggest figurative forms, but the artist wisely leaves just enough to the imagination that we are left wanting to fill in the blanks. While the success of the works is somewhat uneven (some of the best works had just the right mix of intention and fervor while others seemed hastily assembled according to set norms), viewers can appreciate the full range of the artist’s explorations of the relationship between rope and line.

Shrimp, Seth Price, Galerie Chantal Crousel

Kentridge, Deacon, and some other guys…

I just checked out a few shows currently in the Marais and they were a mixed bag…

The William Kentridge show at Marian Goodman was huge disappointment… and normally I love this artist! I think his illustrations and films are fantastic meditations full of subtle transformations and metaphors for how we grow and change over time… but this show was terrible. I don’t know whose idea it was for Kentridge to try his hand at sculpture or to get into digital video but the results are a series of flat one-liners that could have been made by anyone… Rarely am as disappointed with a high profile show (but then, rarely do I have such high expectations…)!

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised with the wooden and ceramic sculptures in Richard Deacon’s show at Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery. The artist’s more familiar metal works were the least interesting part of the exhibition (perhaps this was because the wall pieces were just less interesting that the artist’s three dimensional work). On the other hand, a large glazed ceramic form, Another kind of Blue, 2005, featured a very poetic contrast between the minimalist geometric form of the sculpture and the artisanal glaze, reminiscent of delftware pottery. In some ways, the work reminded me of Alberto Giacometti “Cube” in the Pompidou Center’s collection (the picture on the gallery website doesn’t do the piece justice). Deacon’s wooden sculptures, especially the central piece in the gallery created out of five twisting columns of wood, have a magical quality. The work in light and airy; the forms bent and twisted with and improbably degree of technical know-how… gorgeous!

As for the group shows out and about, I would skip Perrotin (the only remotely interesting works in that huge space are some prints by R.H. Quaytman), and head to Claudine Papillon. I really liked the photos by Jean-Baptiste Maître and Stéphane Vigny’s faux-real wooden logs from my favorite park in Paris. Florent Pugnaire’s video was even mildly entertaining, which given the bad bad videos that I’ve seen in exhibitions as of late, is a serious compliment. Maître’s photos (hah. The “Master’s” photos…) have a ghostly, uncomfortable quality reminiscent of the artist Tadeusz Kantor’s Kineformy. At first, I thought that they were ink drawings, only later realizing that the geometric forms that recalled some kind of nondescript lettering were made by taking photographs of neon light tubes. The artist’s sculpture of neons, off to the side, is hilarious in it’s own right

La rentrée

Mains, 2009, Yazid Oulab

Hurray for the rentrée! I skimmed through several gallery openings in the Marais last night and the following works/shows stood out in my mind…

While I generally enjoyed Yazid Oulab’s show at Eric Dupont’s gallery, I didn’t much care for the charcoal drawings and the spikes, preferring the artist’s more poetic and metaphorical works. Oulab made an impressive scaffolding entirely out of rope and clear resin that was able to stand up straight without an internal armature (as someone who has sculpted with rope before, I can tell you this is no easy feat). My favorite piece was a drawing of a pair of hands holding/covering the space between them out of barbed wire. The work juxtaposed a material that was at once extremely light weight and searingly sharp with open, organic, humanized and receptive forms. The resulting “line drawing” depicted hands of a living person (the hands reach out but still have muscle tension so the fragments seem isolated but not literally cut off of he rest of the body). The work is large (about 1m x 1,5 m) and full of tension between what you see and how it is made.

Michelangelo Penso’s Blue Genetic Structures hanging from the ceiling and walls at Galerie KernotArt were pretty interesting, although I was less of a fan of the artist’s other sculptures made of hardware straps glued around eachother to form round, “blob-like forms.” The shape of the structures seems to be planned in relation to the spaces in which they’re exhibited- by tying the work to different stable points in the surrounding architecture, Penso forms a kind of web out of bright blue straps usually used to tie heavy loads of material together in construction or transportation settings. I think the works would look great in a much larger space, and I hope the artist gets a chance to create a temporary installation with the material in a site where he has more or an opportunity to play with the spacing between the strap elements.
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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.