We are pleased to introduce RESTONS UNIS, a collective initiative that brings together twenty-six Parisian galleries. Throughout this summer, each gallery presents a selection of works, available in our Viewing Salon as well as exhibited in our Saint-Claude space in Paris.
The seven participating galleries feature artists Boris Achour, Pierre Ardouvin, Anna-Eva Bergman, François Curlet, Santiago de Paoli, Sam Durant, Claire Fontaine, Carsten Höller, David Horvitz, Kapwani Kiwanga, Guillaume Lebon, Fabien Mérelle, Cécilé Noguès, Sanhat Rao, Maxime Rossi, Endre Tót, Bruno Serralongue, Jim Shaw, Georges Tony Stoll, and Lois Weinberger.
Air de Paris presents the works of François Curlet, Claire Fontaine, Carsten Höller and Bruno Serralongue. Founded in Nice, in 1990 by Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino. In 1994, Air de Paris moves to Paris where she stays for 25 years before relocating in the premises of a former factory in Romainville.
Since the late 1980s, François Curlet (born in 1967 in Paris) has been developing a corpus where the material world is dismantled through everyday poetry. Using as much artifact as philosophy, the artist develops a strategy where the associations of ideas are transformed into allegories. From the essential to the trivial, his work invites reinvention, surprise, using as much of a vocabulary close to joyful skepticism as cynical laughter.
Big Corn is a transgenic sculpture, a post-product, a pop object... Whether objects, signs, messages, the prosposals of François Curlet are subjected to a variety of displacements and transformations that divert, invert, or even invalidate their own functionalities. With his talent for distorting cultural codes, he brings out their potential for play, poetry and narration, infusing everything he touches with his caustic humour.
After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.
The work of art is a potential weapon, the use value of which is pending.
The work of Carsten Höller (born in 1961 in Brussels), who originally studied science to a post-doctorate level, interrogates perception on a visual and sensorial level. Höller often takes different scientific experiments and techniques and transposes them into the space of art in order to create different forms of participatory sculpture and installation. He is known for working with a vast variety of media with which he asks his to viewer to test what their knowledge or certainties about reality, which is rarely if ever confirmed, but rather beset with doubt or even subtly undermined.
In an elegant museum display case, each of the small sculptures is made up of faithful reproductions of an amanita and another mushroom. The phalloid amanites are commonly used during shamanic ceremonies, the shaman who ingests them allows to restore the links within the clan and this one with the cosmos.
Bruno Serralongue (born in 1968 in Chatellerault, France) has been developing since the early 1990s a work that questions and reveals the conditions of production, distribution and circulation of the media image. If he is not a reporter in the strict sense of the term - he does not work for any media -, Bruno Serralongue does not photograph the news and the major events that compose it. Contrary to the spectacular treatment of mainstream media, his artistic approach to the documentary image favors off-screen, long time and collective movements.
Since 2014 Serralongue has documented the struggles of the ZAD of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes. He thus accompanied the Naturalists in struggle during their outings to inventory the flora and fauna of the wetland. It is the discovery of certain species of plants or animals which repeatedly makes it possible to stop the progress of the project, and in particular that of the crested newt that we see in this image.
Galerie Allen features works by Boris Achour and Maxime Rossi. Established in the 9th district of Paris, Allen gallery was founded by Allen Shea et Mel O’Callaghan.
Boris Achour (born in 1966 in Marseille)creates sculptures, objects of value, cold, smooth and clean, which directly refer to a minimal and authoritarian aesthetic.
The title, Contrôle, alludes to the ways we are governed in the civic space by the authorities to create a harmonious society contradicting with the private freedom we hold in our own toilets. These enamelled bathroom porcelain sculptures manufactured by CRAFT, Limoges, are 1:1 reproductions of 4 different models of barriers used to prohibit the parking of cars on the pavements of Paris streets. This common porcelain, implicitly referring to Fontaine de Duchamp, is associated with an urban context: concepts of intimate experiences in the private contrast with those in the public domain.
Unlike many other Maxime Rossi (born in 1980 in Paris) projects, these works evoke silence and calm, precisely in accordance with the will of Frédéric Chopin, who always preferred intimacy to a wider public.
Père Lachaise Vol. II (2019) is a single work comprised of 90 large unique drawings, each depicting a score taken from pages of a working version sheet music of the Mazurkas by Frederic Chopin. Like a typology of scores, the drawings show a partition enlarged to the paper sheet, splattered with colorful ink spots. The spots were ‘drawn’ by the branches of a willow tree overhanging the resting place of Romantic composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetary.
Poggi gallery presents the works of Anna Eva Bergman, Kapwani Kiwanga and Georges Tony Stoll. The gallery was founded by curator and art historian Jérôme Poggi in 2009 and is located rue Beaubourg in Paris.
Norwegian-born artist Anna-Eva Bergman produced a intense work marked by a radical turn, which will take her from figuration to abstraction. At the border between abstraction and figuration, Anna Eva Bergman said above all "cultivate the art of abstracting". From 1952 she began her sleek and minimalist style where the metal leaf, gold, silver or bronze are playing a leading role.
N°61 - Astre is a rare work from her production, and one of her first celestial representations where the sun is represented in full, entirely with gold leaf, which the artist scratched to reveal the magma of colors they overlap.
Kapwani Kiwanga is a French-Canadian artist based in Paris.
Flowers for Africa is a formal project that the artist initiated in 2013 during a residency in Senegal and that continues today. This work is part of a historiographical approach. By carrying out iconographic research in the national archives or in photographic agencies, the artist focused on the presence of flowers during diplomatic events linked to the independence of the African countries. Arranged on the negotiation tables, on the stages during speeches or even in the city during parades, these floral compositions become testimonies of these historic moments.
Georges Tony Stoll was born in 1955 in Marseille. He now lives and works in Paris.
It was by chance that Georges Tony Stoll began taking photographs upon his return from New York in 1991, when he was offered a camera. While pursuing a work of painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, video and writing, he quickly established himself as one of the most outstanding photographers of his generation. His images, often produced with the use of a flash, are distinguished from the so-called "intimate" photography of his contemporaries by a more abstract dimension, in the philosophical sense of the term, echoing scenes that one might think allegorical, metaphorical or mythological.
Praz-Delavallade is pleased to present the works of Pierre Ardouvin, Sam Durant, David Horvitz, Fabien Mérelle and Jim Shaw. Founded in 1995, Praz-Delavallade gallery is established in Paris and Los Angeles.
Pierre Ardouvin was born in 1955 in Crest, France. His work imbues a unified representation of knowledge. He is fully at the service of a poetic work that unfolds in the formats of installation, collage and assemblage. He has developed a reflection on the culture of the spectacle, the memory of utopias and the future of everyday rituals.
Succès Fou is a series of sculptures created in 2013 and onwards inviting a philosophy of bittersweet laughter borrowed from circus folklore referencing clown blanc and Auguste.
Sam Durant (born in 1961 in Seattle) refers to social, political and cultural events in his art that echo not only American history but also a broad universal history. The question of engagement is at the heart of his practice.
Composed of 12 large drawings No Justice, No Peace (2017) can be seen as an index referencing the handmade political signs of protesters following the unlawful murders of black civilians by law enforcement officers. The unified slogans of the protesters remade by the artist become a plea for fair justice, and the recent news of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis is a grim reminder of this.
David Horvitz was born in 1974 in California where he lives and works.
Air de L.A. is a nod to his interest in conceptualism. On the occasion of Frieze Week in February 2020, Horvitz paid homage, 100 years apart, to Marcel Duchamp and his 50 cc Paris Air by producing, with the support of Ruinart, a series of ampoule’s, each filled with air from Los Angeles loaded with a few fine ash particles from the major fires that ravaged Malibu and the extreme tip of West LA at the end of 2019.
Fabien Mérelle, with one recent drawings (2020) titled Devenir un arbre reinforces his dreamlike penchant. On the very morning of the first day of the confinement he went to see, as an emergency, a tree of his acquaintance. Two months later, straddling his bicycle, without any precise goal, he took a rest at the foot of a tree on the side of the road. This dendrology cultivated in favor of the future of trees has always fascinated him, strengthening his desire to draw them, to become one metaphorically “the more they separate me from them, the more I draw them, the more I become the tree.”
Jim Shaw, an atypical and iconic figure in the Californian art world, shares with Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley the same desire to produce art that explores the metaphorical and obscure sides of a standardized American society. His investigations are fragments of a story that is both personal and collective.
Briefcase Cat (2019), remade from a surreal dream of sexy cats in the shape of briefcases, employ a sexualized yet political and legal imagery—the briefcase itself being a case intended to carry legal briefs.
Salle Principale is happy to present Endre Tót and Lois Weinberger. The gallery has been founded in 2014 by Maryline Brustolin and is established in the 19th district of Paris.
Endre Tót (born in 1937 in Sümeg, Hungria) is one of the most significant figures of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde generation and an emblematic figure of international conceptualism and mail art. Tót’s developed his main subjects, Nothingness, Joy, as well as his Rain series from 1971 onwards, all significant works which are signature pieces of his conceptual ideas. The first manifestation of Nothingness as an idea in Tót’s art was the use of the Zero character, appearing in various contexts and media. Tót’s so-called 'Joys' or 'Gladnesses' were humorous parodies of the culture of optimism, articulated via a long-term series of actions and artworks.
The performance On est heureux quand on manifeste is an action which takes place on the Champs Elysées in Paris in 1979. The Gladnesses by Endre Tót were ironic parodies of optimism as an artistic weapon and a strategy of survival in the face of political oppression of communism.
Lois Weinberger (1947-2020), works on a poetic-political network that draws our attention to marginal zones and questions hierarchies of various types. Weinberger, who sees himself as a field worker, embarked in the 1970s on ethno-poetic works that form the basis for his ongoing artistic investigations of natural and man-made spaces.
The cartography ‘Field Work’ borrows words from ‘One score more’, an anthology of poems and proses published by the German publishing house Burning Deck, from 1982 to 2002.
Galerie Joseph Tang presents a selection of works by Cécile Noguès and Shanta Rao. The gallery established in the 3rd district of Paris has been founded by Joseph Tang.
The rigorous practice of ceramic making in recent years by Cécile Noguès (born in 1975 in Paris) hides her polymorphic interest in other mediums in plain sight. Her collages, poems, paintings, photographs are often stowed away either in the far corner racks of her studio or hiding under the guise of a few blog posts in plain sight. More curiously is how the sculptor's hands can reveal what cannot be hidden and yet which cannot be defined. Similar to Rosemarie Trockel’s approach that seems to be too liberating to be withheld in a single medium, what we can see from Nogues’ ceramics are not what can only be defined in any plastic context but something more tacitly cerebral.
Shanta Rao lives and works in Paris. The artist has a long term academic research into subjects on the essence of material things have led her to a series of work that are recognised as ambiguously as either sculpture or painting. And in this oscillation a bridge is erected between the fundamental dynamics of the two medium.
UNTITLED is made with polymer paint. As 3D printed objects can demonstrate how pigment can become a building material, these works lend their existence from an accumulation of paint layers into a state of objecthood, thus as sculptures . A reverse is also true when consider the intrinsic quality of pigment layers, the aesthetic of surface building run in equal course as any big pictures of another generation, so can be defended in equal terms as painting.
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff presents Guillaume Leblon and Santiago de Paoli. The gallery, named after its founder, was created in 2003 in Paris.
Guillaume Leblon was born in 1971 in Paris.
Whether producing, in ceramic, a mould of the wood stove he used to heat his studio; in bronze, an imprint of sand from a beach and, with it, the thousand and one microcosms that compose it; in plaster, the fossils of woollen and cotton stoles; or else inking stone slabs and wooden cleats; or else reproducing a chaise longue while replacing its upholstery with panes of glass; what Guillaume Leblon effects is a translation of materials and a transition between worlds. Numerous elements taken from the world of furnishings structure his sculptures. In this way, furniture can be found at the meeting place between the motifs that crisscross this French artist’s work: humans and objects, forms and functions, the animated and the inanimate, and mobility in space. Proportions and balance are the key words. Thus, an object can just as easily be dissimulated, stored away or exhibited by the furniture, which then comes over as being the responsible party for its intrusion into space. The artist creates temporary zones for inhabiting the world which are marked but, at the same, perfectly mixable with reality.
Santiago de Paoli was born in 1978 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He lives and works in London, UK.
Never taking for granted the nature of painting, what he does continually interrogates what a paintings is while staving off any attempt to render it politically expedient by virtue of the weirdness and ambiguity of his subject matter. This is, needless to say, a dangerous position, anywhere, but especially in Latin America– where art is almost always expected to unequivocally communicate a specific political ideology. Demurring any status of symptom or allegory, they gently ask to be seen as things in themselves– things whose art has nothing to do with communication, but everything to do with painting.
