calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/6/2012

The Eternal Detour cycle

Mamco, Geneve

Vidya Gastaldon, You’re monstrous and I like you

Vidya Gastaldon’s worlds are getting thicker. For some years the artist covered sheets of paper with layer upon layer of coloured pencil, wax crayon, ink, gouache, watercolour and paint of all kinds. Then, just over a year ago, she began using oil on canvas. This change of medium and surface, as well her switch to larger works, has enabled her to adopt an increasingly dense, increasingly material approach. Although this can be taken quite literally — Gastaldon uses a syrupy substance that she dilutes or condenses to suit her requirements — her subject matter, too, is becoming more ‘materialist’.


Over the past decade Vidya Gastaldon has developed what might be termed a neo-Symbolist way of working. Her sculptures and installations made of fabric, her animated films and, above all, her drawings and now also paintings describe a world that is more than just a concrete exterior based solely on rational knowledge. The forms of her landscapes, which are sometimes inhabited by fantastic animals, conjure up a higher or altered consciousness, and invite the viewer to decipher a set of references that lie both within and outside the work. Thus the artist freely makes reference not only to the Bhagavad Gita and the temptations of St Anthony, but also to the Barbapapa family and SpongeBob SquarePants. Borrowed indiscriminately from erudite as well as popular sources, these motifs coexist in perfect harmony — and that is what makes Gastaldon’s work truly ‘psychedelic’. Psychedelic art, which emerged in the early 1960s, was more than just a style — it was a vast popular movement to democratise knowledge, be it sacred (Eastern), scientific (lysergic acid diethylamide) or avant-garde (European Surrealism).

The resulting syncretic, non-dualist outlook tells of a cycle of life — of living matter — that is forever changing, forever transmigrating. But whereas Biolovarama, Gastaldon’s first monographic exhibition at Mamco in 2005, was still largely about the start of a vital process of emergence, the iconographic world in her current exhibition is much closer to Max Ernst’s Europe after the rain, a hallucinatory landscape from 1942 full of an evil the soil will never entirely be able to quench — a phase of indistinctness and annihilation that nevertheless results in a strident joy, as witness the toothy grins and ecstatic gazes of the cups, saucers and other pieces of a paint-daubed tea set, which all seem to be exclaiming You’re monstrous and I like you.

----

Bruno Gironcoli,
Cavalcade: sculptures and drawings, 1963-2001

Bruno Gironcoli occupies a special place in contemporary sculpture, particularly because of his monumental works, resembling hybrid, even extraterrestrial, altars in which mechanical components are combined with organic motifs. His work constantly alternates between representation of abstract elements and physical realism, as if to avoid any thematic or iconographic interpretation.


Yet a closer look makes clear that Gironcoli’s work had a classical focus — for he never ceased to study the human figure. From the early 1960s onwards he attempted to produce a contemporary image of the human body. He drew inspiration from the work of Alberto Giacometti, with its ability to resolve the conflict between how things appear and what they really are. His first works — drawings of models that at first focused on the face, and then on the various postures of the body — sought the essence of the human figure, and experimented with ways of conveying abstract themes in portraiture. This classic way of tackling the motif contrasted with his approach to sculpture: from the outset he abandoned such traditional materials as wood, marble or bronze in favour of what were then new materials such as plastic, and especially polyester, which was to play a key part in his work. He used this industrial material to create objects that had a very limited formal vocabulary and would be hard to grasp were it not for their titles, such as Kopf (‘Head’). He began his work as a sculptor with a series of heads that looked more like ‘specific objects’ than busts, and seemed to underscore their relationship to the wall and the perception of the object in space. At the same time, these works enabled Gironcoli to explore the formal potential of polyester and test what the poor-quality material could actually convey. He also painted his prototypes bronze, silver and gold. This metallic coating suggested cast iron, but rather than lend the objects a specific quality it seemed to poke fun at them and emphasise their artificial, almost kitschy appearance. The artist’s use of this low-quality, factory-made material may have been influenced by American pop art or by Viennese Actionism, which Gironcoli kept in close touch with. What probably caught his attention was the Actionists’ wish to integrate the real world into artists’ work and to test the limits of art. Unlike the Actionists, however, he did not seek to destroy artistic genres, and he never gave up sculpture. On the other hand, he clung to the notion of ritual and sacrifice, a way of blending the sacred and the prosaic that was most fully expressed in his work Gelbe Madonna (‘Yellow Madonna’, 1975-1977). This work, involving an object that was clearly isolated by being on a pedestal, also marked the end of his research into installations. For the first time the sculpture was presented as an altar, both a place of ritual and an object of obsession.

This notion of a stage or scenery with actors seeming to move within the space of the sculpture was most clearly reflected in the drawings that Gironcoli produced alongside his sculptural work. His drawings approached the human figure in a more head-on fashion, displaying a wounded, tortured, assaulted body that seemed to be part of some ceremony or choreography. But they were also a way of treating space as an actual stage for a happening or a performance. They were never illustrations of existing or future works. It was rather as if Gironcoli wanted to show the places where his sculptures, his stage fantasies or their future settings were produced. At the same time, in the late 1970s, he built up a repertoire of small-scale forms that he exhibited in display cases. These sculptures soon became modules that would recur in large-scale compositions. Babies, larvae, bunches of grapes, ears of corn, even phallic or vaginal figures thus became a formal vocabulary that would be expressed in monumental form in assemblies that revealed an ever-changing process of intuition.

----

Alex Hanimann,
No proof, no commentary, no double entendre

French-speaking visitors to Mamco are bound to be surprised by the title of Alex Hanimann’s exhibition, for the expression ‘double entendre’, although well established in English, does not exist in French. The same bizarrerie can be found throughout the exhibition. Word play is a key feature of Hanimann’s work, whose other main component, the world of images, has been displayed here at Mamco on several occasions.


The artist’s approach is part of a set of highly varied contemporary practices at the interface between art and words, which began developing in all directions at the start of the twentieth century. Written language has since become an increasingly prominent feature of the visual arts, and the specifically visual nature of writing has sometimes even resulted in the elimination of all other elements. This is the point of contact between the two facets of Alex Hanimann’s work, which subtly meet in some of his drawings, with the text hovering above the pictorial matter like a heading or contained in an expressive comic-strip balloon.

When he gets away from images and works with ‘pure’ language, Hanimann exploits all its resources: punctuation marks, words, sentences, phonetics and switching from one language to another. In response to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who said that ‘the graphic sign is an image or form worthy of consideration in and for itself’, Hanimann offers us all the different uses that he instils into the typographic material. His pages of text, as small as a book or as large as a wall, are not as varied as the bits of newspaper found in Cubist works, but they are firmly grounded in the field of writing. Letters and figures acquire visual properties as much through their drawn or typewritten form as through their arrangement on the page. As we know, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was the first to break free from the traditional constraints of printing, but it is surprising to learn that text was invented later than writing. History relates that the first superintendent of the Library of Alexandria, Zenodotus of Ephesus (third century BCE), when confronted with the many problems of reading and filing written matter (particularly scriptio continua), introduced the first means of organising it visually on the page, namely blank spaces between words1.

Alex Hanimann’s work seeks to move beyond purely graphic research, which is not so much a goal as a starting point, a release mechanism for the viewer’s ideas, a linguistic trigger. The artist juggles with words, alert to their meanings and those that may emerge when they are juxtaposed, assembled, underlined, crossed out, read backwards or translated into another language.

‘To arrange is to interpret’ is one of Hanimann’s favourite sayings. Observing and analysing his extensive output — his picture drawings and his work with language — as well as his impressive archive of photographs cut from newspapers and magazines dealing with society and politics, he has felt a pressing need to create his own thesaurus, even at the risk of getting lost in it. This has resulted in thematic corpora. Given the artist’s encyclopaedic interest in language, his thematic arrangement is based on ways of use, rules of all kinds, puns, logic, everyday language, lists of words, axioms, and the rhythms and sounds of words. By the same token, his images are arranged into groups made up of plants, animals, abstract drawings, dancing, characters that act, characters that present themselves, and so on.

Whether painted on walls, blown into neon tubes, drawn in gouache letter by letter and assembled in monumental collages or shaped like illuminated signs, Alex Hanimann’s texts, even if they suggest possible linkages of meaning, somehow remain ‘floating’. This is because they never impose an exact or absolute meaning — instead, readers are free to grasp their meaning and make their own associations as they read them.

----

Anton Henning, Non-stop beach

Anton Henning’s work frequently refers to art history, which he takes very seriously and yet approaches with light-hearted irony. His artistic world is a subversive one in which painting, even though the main topic of his work, is not its sole medium, for it coexists with sculpture, furniture and video.


His painting has a wide range of sources, borrowing from artists as diverse as Courbet, Picasso, Picabia or Arp, to name just a few. All the established painting genres, such as nudes, landscapes, portraits or still lifes, are usually approached in an absurd, grotesque manner. Although Henning does not actually disguise his sources, what he is really doing is interpreting them rather than borrowing directly from them. Each of his paintings is a new work which he treats as reminiscence or subjective commentary, and to which he often adds autobiographical details. His work reflects a wish to view art history in an unconventional way, as a means of incorporating various registers of painting. To Henning, this apparent eclecticism in both style and subject is an expression of his total artistic freedom — an attitude that enables him to develop a wide variety of formal idioms, thereby blurring the identity of the source. At first glance it seems hard to make the connection between a naturalistic landscape painting and a grotesque portrait, or abstract compositions which are often entitled ‘Intérieur’ and may have a simple geometric structure or, on the contrary, be full of arabesques. On the one hand, the artist seems to want to come to terms with the notion of beauty, in other words a kind of ‘good taste’; on the other, he appears to delight in developing a campy style. Defined in Susan Sontag’s famous essay Notes on Camp (1964), camp is reflected in Henning’s work not only as a predilection for exaggeration and special effects, but also as a tendency to foster bad taste or an ironic worship of kitsch. His titles also seem intended to disconcert viewers rather than help them understand the work. The aforementioned title, Intérieur, may refer to a living room with a couch, a coffee table and pictures on the walls, or may stand for various abstract compositions. A Portrait may indeed turn out to be a self-portrait, but it could just as easily be a Marcel Breuer chair. This deliberately confusing approach may be a way to keep viewers alert and give them an active role in interpreting the artist’s work. The multiplicity of styles and treatments in Henning’s painting is echoed in his approach to sculpture, furniture and video. This wish to be an all-round artist can also be seen in the way he arranges his works in space. He therefore treats installations as a true medium in which he acts as curator of his own exhibitions; these become settings not only for his works, but also for the viewer. Henning thus ‘stages’ his work with a combination of very different genres and sometimes conflicting aesthetics. His installations thus depend on finding a particular tone that will maintain cohesion between the various works. They are also designed as the ideal context for contemplating his works, in which all the elements are interconnected and the viewer becomes part of the installation. The artist thus creates settings that enable him take his viewers into a sphere which depends on experience rather than knowledge, and which, by virtue of its mobility, always creates an unusual situation — a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Anton Henning was born in Berlin in 1964, and now lives in Manker

----

Sylvie Auvray, The Geneva series

With a varied background that has included a brief period at the Montpellier School of Fine Arts and a course at the City & Guilds of London Art School, plus a spell in the fashion world, Sylvie Auvray has built up a broad range of skills and artistic techniques (including oil on canvas, Indian ink, stoneware, ceramics and faience coated with enamel or glycerophthalic paint) that might lead us to think she is just another well-trained young woman — were it not that, on closer inspection, we are struck by the disturbing strangeness of her familiar-looking figures.

After taking part in a group event to mark the opening of London’s Blue Door Gallery and producing printed fabrics and accessories for fashion designers Gaspard Yurkievich, Sonia Rykiel, Martine Sitbon and Bernhard Willhelm, Auvray has pursued her career as a visual artist whose daily practice brings her into contact with all kinds of new media (her latest venture is moulded concrete). In 2007 she was invited by Delphine Coindet to join the group exhibition ‘Sweet and Extra Dry’ at Lausanne’s Circuit art centre. In what is her first solo show in Switzerland, she now presents her most recent work: masks, sculptures, paintings and drawings.

Unlike ‘ordinary’ masks, Sylvie Auvray’s are not necessarily meant to be worn. They are human, animal or hybrid faces in all kinds of shapes and sizes, with expressions ranging from smiles to grimaces, from terror to compassion. Whether zombies or mummies, colourful, drab, daubed, sallow, toothy, hairless, hirsute, wolfish, equine, ratty, bearlike, avian, reptilian or simian figures, symbolic, fantastic or quite simply wolves, these hollow-eyed surrogate figures conjure up all that is primitive and repressed within us.

Following in their wake, Auvray’s bestioles (‘critters’) are extras in a weird parade, passengers on an ark which, contrary to expectations, has only taken withered, misshapen, monstrous creatures on board, each of them worthy of display in a cabinet of wonders, alongside the ‘natural fantastic’ that is sometimes produced by nature, or more deliberately fantastic curiosities such as ‘boîtes trembleuses’ and mermaid skeletons, made specially for the gullible minds that delight in such wondrous things. Rhino, Phoque (‘Seal’), Gossip, Elephant, Tête de Morse (‘Walrus head’), Singe (‘Monkey’), Emmanuel, Deepo 1 & 2, Raton + Brioche (‘Baby rat + Brioche’), Pepita and Petite tête orange (‘Small orange head’) could just as easily have stood alongside the star-nosed mole whose waving appendages make our skin crawl because they combine to form such a uniquely repulsive figure.

Our shock on first seeing the bestioles gives way to ‘a sympathy without which there can be no relationship between the work and the viewer’, as André Breton wrote in The Magic Art; for these insignificant creatures, hastily produced by empirical rather than well-defined methods, in which chance and experimentation play a far from negligible part, arouse empathy in the viewer. And yet, however touching and droll they may be, these ‘critters’, remote as they are from the reproduction of reality, create a sense of strangeness, and their seemingly innocent familiarity becomes challenging. The artist’s treatment of surfaces — plain and sober despite the pictorial overload of some of her sculptures — prevents her from lapsing into kitsch. There is an intense contact between the bestioles, which appear to be conversing, so that it would come as no surprise to hear them speaking just like the animals in the works of Lewis Carroll — if only because we cannot help but notice their anthropomorphic features.

Auvray’s paintings are a no less striking element in this world of hers. Pied (‘Foot’) is above all comical and incongruous, but Portrait 2 is frankly strange. Its gaze, intensely absorbing that of the viewer, recalls the picture of Dorian Gray, reflecting the darkness that lurks within us. Some of these works, produced at one go in cold, even murky tones, oscillate between dream and nostalgia. With their echoes of childhood, disguise, the American Dream, these are images of a world that can no longer be reached except through the imagination.

Sylvie Auvray was born in Paris in 1974, and now lives there.

Image: Bestioles, 2011
© Mauro Mongiello

Press: Sophie Eigenmann
Responsable des relations avec la presse

Mamco | Musée d¹art moderne et contemporain
10 rue des Vieux-Grenadiers Genève
Open Thuesday through Friday from noon to 6 p.m., the first Wednesday of the month until 9 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays as well as Friday 6 April, Sunday 27 and Monday 28 May 2012.
Regular admission CHF 8, reduced admission CHF 6, group admission CHF 4

stampa

permanent link