Conceived in a form of urgency, COLLECTION No. 12 marks the reopening of our venue in an atmosphere that is not clearly defined. Even if the situation has improved, it is still uncertain.
The showcased artists are all experimenting a kind of journey to other dimensions. Those of revisited architectural utopias, of condensed time-spaces from the whole world or in the limbo of accidental remains and supernatural, almost mystical visions. The visitor's journey is chaotic, like a time traveler, the works interweaving in different temporalities, from the interior space to the exterior courtyard. Most of them are brand-new works and have been produced during the lockdown. They contain within them a kind of escape, more or less obvious, sometimes dreamed, recomposed, sublimated or disturbing.
The interior space is in between a waiting room and a bed room. Ella Mievovsky delivers her feelings about the current context, a temporal parenthesis, a breath in a continuous flow of frozen images. These images come from video surveillance cameras that she captures, hacks, gleans, both in the public and private spheres. She embodies them with oil paint on plaster molds from all the food trays she has consumed. Her installation materializes into a refuge that she seeks to leave, a distortion of time halfway between the current vaccination tents and Kabakov's hut. A framework of space whose walls are frozen in plaster. A possible escape is a found image, duplicated and enlarged as a passage to another dimension. In front of this flow of fixed images, Fabien Villon reveals the shock of fate through sculptures that sublimate the accident. His sculpture together, 2021 is an assemblage of seats from a damaged Porsche nailed on old wood chairs from the beginning of XXth century. The curves are strangely harmonious in an anthropomorphic dimension while the texture of the seats balances between attraction and repulsion. Burnt leather and foam, mixture of molten materials, impression of snake scales. It could refers both to funeral Egyptian furniture or remains from an aircraft. From the back, once can imagine a couple sitting on it, like two viewers.
The outside has been closely thought with the specificity of the place. Basile Ghosn proposes a rewriting of Modern utopias by placing the questions of his time. He uses production methods to the alternative press, gleans images, cuts them out, recomposes them, enlarges them, alters them with photocopiers and silk-screening, and then deploys them in the exhibition space by associating them with materials such as glass, steel or Plexiglas. His new tryptic SECRET FRIENDS I, II, III with the support of Drac Paca, has been conceived for the courtyard, as stained glass in a strong contrast with the architecture. Made with colorful plexiglass and collage of photocopies and aluminum tape, these large formats welcome the viewer in modernist areas that balance between abrasive dream and melancholic diversion.
On the floor two sculptures are one on top of the other. Marnie Weber’s Leef peepers, 2020 on Fabien Villon’s To a solitary walker, 2021.
Los Angeles based artist Marnie Weber did this costume during last fall when she decided to spend all the lockdown in the woods of the East coast. The title refers to a voyeuristic way as well as a north american tree frog that has some brownish-gray skin with a dark cross on the back. This is also a nod to the the appreciation of humans in watching transformation through the changing of the leaves. « As I watched the trees change in this past fall I saw in my minds eye a spirit covered in leaves watching me. I thought of it as a witch or woodland spirit as a voyeur watching us from the realm of the beyond » (Marnie Weber). Fabien Villon showcases To a solitary walker, 2021 a bench found in the Saône river in Lyon, full of sediments and mussels after decades. Covered with epoxy resin, It looks like wet as if it just has been out of the water.
Both works are an invitation to the viewer to sit on it, close to this strange creature and to experiment something in between meditation and contemplation, landscape and brutalist architecture.
.jpg)
-13.jpg)
