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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.

Amy Granat, Peter Coffin, Nathan Hylden

There’s a good photo show going on right now at Chez Valentin and where I was pleased to discover a collection of photograms by Amy Granat. These abstract images created by exposing photo paper to light in various ways are at once ghostly and attractive – the paper is usually literally “ruined” in some way (ripped corners, etc,). The pieces play with intentionality; the physical works are not perfectly glossed up images but rather unsettling sketches, perhaps the photographic equivalent of displaying a painter’s palette as a work of art.

The Peter Coffin show at Emmanuel Perrotin is pretty lame; the neon abstract wall works are terribly unoriginal. The log with a disco ball inside is a funny juxtaposition of two elements that bear little relation to one another (is celebrity culture killing nature?), though the piece would have been better had it been hung from the ceiling (I realize it’s heavy, but it’s also Perrotin)… The one piece that really caught my eye was Untitled (Slow Motion Campfire), a video from 2009 documenting a campfire burning in black and white (not sure if it’s looped). Like a real campfire, it’s completely mesmerizing, and makes viewers reflect of the relationship between video and any “natural spectacle.”

Nath Hylden’s show Once I Get Started, at Art: Concept contains a series of great painted/silk screened abstract works on a variety of different supports (metal, canvas, etc.).  White overpaint obscures abstract planes of light and dark divided by purple haze borders. The haze and whily drops of paint remind me of universes in scientific images of space. This viewer thus alternates between a macro view of “planetary” content and a micro view that considers the materials and surfaces that Hylden embraces.

José Maria Sicilia | CECILIA (Constellations)

I wasn’t crazy about the other pieces in the current show at Galerie Chantal Crousel but I liked the simple gestures of Sicilia’s Cecilia sculptures. Flat door sized slabs of marble, leaning against the wall, covered in smooth round “bubbles” that seems to float on the surface of still water. The effect was clean and contemplative; each protrusion existed in communion with the others, but also in it’s own separate world. The only aspect that I found annoying was that the “bubbles” were surrounded by shallow, round, concave pools. The works were made by cutting into a stone of a certain width, and  if the artist has began the work with a thicker stone, which would have allowed some more subtle variations in the depth and size of each “bubble,” as well as its’ relation to the surrounding space…

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.

Jeff Cowen at Seine 51

Cowen presents a series of black and white photos. The grainy, slightly out of focus images depict women, abstract forms, a statues, and even a boat. The mood is somber; each photo reflects the wear and tear of time rather than the short instant in which light hits a negative. Each photo is slightly manually manipulated by the artist; his process is visible in stray marks and in the rings at the corners of each image (where each large sheet of paper was held down during the exposure process). The finished works do not aspire to classical precision.  In a piece such as Nathalia, 2009 (350 x 258 cm, tirage argentique), the corners may be ripped and the paper on which the images are printed is inexactly cut from a larger roll. Nevertheless this ripping gives the images a certain frailty that complements the content of the works. Certain photos in the show, including Nathalia, are printed twice, at slightly different exposures, and subsequently exhibited as diptychs. Cowen denies the authority of a singular “best” image that most “defines” his subject matter. For him, making images is as much a process of searching for the ineffable as it is a finished product.

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/

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)…

Véronique Boudier at Galerie Chez Valentin

A really nice video piece for those pyromaniacs out there… It reminded me of some of Bill Viola’s work, except less meta, more foreboding. I liked the sometimes natural, sometimes slightly dissonant sound in « Nuit d’un jour » and the way in which it made me reflect on real spaces vs. film sets. On display until December 27th.