4/10/2002
Donachie, Grout/Mazeas
Frac, Montpellier
Jacqueline Donachie organizes space with the help of metal tubular structures, akin to safety railings and urban fixtures, and exhibits the photography of a developed landscape. Sylvain Grout and Yann Mazéas use codes and popular imagery. They show a hitherto unscreened video, inspired straight from gore movies. In a tracking shot, the artists plunge us into a world of blood and guts.
Jacqueline Donachie
Grout Mazeas
Jacqueline Donachie organizes space with the help of metal tubular structures, akin to safety railings and urban fixtures, and exhibits the photography of a developed landscape.
Territory, city-planning, architecture and environment are questioned in their physical and social dimension.
The different forms are scattered throughout the gallery, summoning visitors, steering the direction of the visit, and available for a certain use.
These generic sculptures serve as facilities and surfaces for the appropriations and performances available to the public.
The impact of the forms on behaviour and the notion of scale determine the potential forms of praxis. The young Scottish artist focuses her work on the introspection of the real and on privacy and intimacy.
Based on observations, not to say anecdotes, she constructs minimal works that are likely to verge on common sense.
The landscape displayed, taken from the top of a building--an at once spectacular and commonplace maquette--reproduces the layout of roads, motorways and tracks, applied by city-planners and inhabitants alike.
In a new way it designates different practices and habits of circulation, as well as a proliferating present frozen by a photo.
In the end, spaces, indoor and outdoor alike, come together, just like social relationships and political structures; today, they look like decorative elements.
The public place is seen by the artist in relation to a social reality, a certain idea of community and culture, and above all in a ceaseless shifting within oneself and with regard to others.
Sylvain Grout and Yann Mazéas use codes and popular imagery. They show a hitherto unscreened video, inspired straight from gore movies. In a tracking shot, the artists plunge us into a world of blood and guts. The décor is firmly set, close up on the ground littered with innards, dirtier and dirtier, and ever more slippery.
The camera slithers about, there is still no imagery of any actors or even of the car that has been customized for the occasion. The aesthetics underpinned by one or two special effects applies both for its levity and for its obvious effect, at once fun and violent.
In order to comfortably relish the images, a massage chair is available to visitors at 2 euros per session (just like the ones you find at motorway rest areas).
Grout/Mazéas talk about boundaries with a dash or irony, somewhere between exultation and psychopathology.
An eloquent quotation makes just such a reference, scrawled on the wall with gelatine, which is as sticky as it is glossy.
It rails against the intolerance that existed in rural America in the 1960s, and highlights a dialogue excerpted from the cult film Easy Rider, which ushered in a new genre, the road movie.
Grout/Mazéas produce more symbols than objects. Between intoxication and disenchantment, they surf on the society of the spectacle, pinpoint exemplary signs and have fun smashing them and then sticking them back together again, in a gesture of critical recognition.
On the face of it, the works of Jacqueline Donachie and Grout/Mazéas have nothing in common.
They come up with different visions and alternatives, and different fictional models.
They nevertheless belong to one and the same generation, so these artists do share a conspicuous interest in popular culture (essentially music and film), the permeable character of public places and private spaces, and the involvement of onlookers.
text:Céline Mélissent, translated by Simon Pleasance
FRAC
4 rue Rambaud F34000 Montpellier
t +33 (0) 4 99 74 20 35/6/7/8/9
f +33 (0)4 99 74 20 49