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12/9/2002

Rut Blees Luxemburg

Laurent Delaye Gallery, London

Cauchemar

Laurent Delaye Gallery is delighted to present a selection of works from Cauchemar, a series of photographs taken in Paris. Concentrated in the cycle of one night of heightened intensity, the images chart a nocturnal enquiry into the centre of the city and its psychic periphery. Produced without the aid of flash and using only the artificial illumination of street lights Luxemburg's images literally absorb light with exposure times of up to 20 minutes. Indeed Cauchemar echoes Blanchot who suggested "When everything has disappeared into the night, everything (that) has disappeared' appears"

Cauchemar is also a work, which questions certain ontological assumption about photography. Neither "form" nor "subject matter" is the focus of the investigation, but a desire for the unstable reading, the dissolution and de-composition, the contamination of forms and the continuous oscillation of the image and its meaning. As a result the artists images often appear to subvert compositional formats and techniques. For example in President the title of the work is drawn from a small fragment of detritus; a butter wrapper visible in the foreground of the image and flanked by the grand geometric forms of Parisian architecture.

Although devoid of the human figure the works evoke the body through its absence. Luxemburg's prints have an eerie quality of compressed time where car head and taillight's leave skate marks across the surface and moving water, (Untitled)-Chain appears as a dense void ebbing at the eroded signature of a dextrous graffiti artist. In the work The Dandy a stern face emerges from the cold stone of a buildings stone cladding, petrified in marble as if drawn by nature. The figure of the dandy stalks the streets of Paris, with his insatiable methodology of flanerie; an attitude to space, centred on kicks and diversions. Looking outwards he has the look of a poised individual yet in the forehead lurks another face, that of the joker. The absent body that haunts Cauchemar is re-animated in the trace of various body parts re-assembled in the anthropomorphic city.

The Red Mass is a photograph of a chain mail gauntlet mounted in a shop window cabinet, and used by French butchers to protect their hands. The cabinet - a location in which objects are displaced, as well as displayed - suggests the collision of time zones and cultures which occurs within the loaded space of the art museum. Luxemburg's glove recalls both the armour of a medieval knight, and a prosthetic limb, yet it's actual usage is the speed cutting of animal flesh for city dwellers.

Near the city's river trees push their roots up from beneath the sealed ground forming monstrous growths in the tarmac that resemble old, worn-out legs. The Veins foregrounds this masked and distorted presence of nature within the city, a place where if you put your nose close to the ground you can still smell its ancient scent.

Rut Blees Luxemburg has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. A selection of works from Cauchemar will be exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in September as part of the Galleries Show. The artist is also currently developing an opera based on her series Liebeslied/My Suicides with a libretto by the philosopher Alexander Garcia Düttmann and a score by the award winning British composer Paul Clarke. Other projects include a public art commission in Nantes and inclusion in the new Phaidon publication, BLINK, which features 100 contemporary photographers, 10 curators and 10 writers.

This exhibition has been designed and installed in collaboration with architect Patrick Lynch.

September 14 ­ October 26 2002
Private viewing: Friday 13th September 6.30 ­ 8.30pm

Gallery Opening Times: Monday-Friday 10-6pm, Saturday 10-4pm.

For press information & images, please contact the gallery on 020 7287 1546 or email: aldo@laurentdelaye.com

Laurent Delaye Gallery
11 Savile Row W1S 3PG UK
London

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