calendario eventi  :: 

X

18/5/2006

Two exhibitions

Fri Art - Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg

Continuum distorsion. Eand on to the Discotheque, Comrade?

With Continuum Distorsion and Eand on to the Discotheque, Comrade ?, Fri-Art, FribourgOs Contemporary Art Centre, proposes an in-depth reflection on the pictorial act, and more specifically on the work of appropriation linked to the evolution of painting in the 20th century and to the concept of originality. Designed for Fri-Art, these two exhibitions germinated for a long time in order to confront the joint work of several artists. The works mix, split and multiply different points of view, superposing visions and infinite influences. Finally, they slyly launch a dialogue between break and tradition, questioning our relationship with history and the reception of the work. As if it were hidden, the meaning of art may be elsewhere, beyond its temporal aspect, beyond the frame of the image and of a space which in this case is the space of the exhibition.

Ground floor and first floor: The Oauthentic-fake authentic paintings by Xavier Noiret-ThomŽ, whose negation or contradiction imply their own assertion, function as a game akin to a chessboard or checkerboard, playing on its own ambiguous aspects. But then, do language and writing do not take a similar approach? Yet the language here is that of the painter, becoming movement, affirming colours with their intensity and forms in a burst of joy. Haphazard lines, accidents, overlaps, the use of the blurred or the distinct, the shiny or the mat, the qualities of absorption or reflection of the pictorial matter, the grainy or smooth texture of its surface, rendered more dense by heterogeneous layers, create an interplay and a ceaseless movement the presence of which, cleared of emotion, has a powerful resonance. Refusing pathos, Xavier Noiret-ThomŽ successfully overcomes genres. He manipulates them, skilfully improvising an alliance of pure impression and analytic mode, both mental and physical. This coming and going between the present and the time of creation unfolds and shapes an autonomous composition that questions the vagaries of the workOs history, itOs medium (via its formats) and its physical space.

Like Picabia, playful poet and maker of aphorisms, Xavier Noiret-Thom sidesteps the common sense and the initial logic of the work, exploring the validity of this radical anti-painting while quoting the historical masters. He associates motifs, superposes them and assumes a varied approach. OThis network of direct references is completed by highly imaginative self-portraits, silvery monochromatic compositions broken like the moonOs surface, and well-defined fields of phosphorescent stars (E'). Not one of the styles is forgotten, not one of the achievements of the history of painting is not transformed (E'). Fontana merges with the figure of a slasher who gained celebrity in the early 1990s: Freddy Krueger, protagonist of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

MondrianOs squares become crossword puzzles with improbable solutions. Grains and beans float above Suprematist works. Tartly coloured monochromatic compositions are labelled with a different colour marker than their own, a wink at Magritte. RichterOs chromatic paintings are reduced to plastic plates glued onto the canvas and coloured. These picnics even allow themselves to invite (also) SpoerriO, writes Sophie Delpeux in OPeinture en deconstructionO for this exhibition.

Xavier Noiret-Thom seems to invite artists to a picnic, a post-modern masquerade. Maybe his intention is to refer to Herman MelvilleOs The Confidence-Man.

He also invites three artists to create protean works in the Villa Medici in Rome. Like an organic sculpture, the piled up posters by Michel Francois take as their photographic subject a tree with endless branchings, tentacle-like rhizomes. In another mode, the constant camera movement of Robert Suermondt follows the meanders and mixed spaces of one of his paintings, and integrates it with the sound of the city. He questions the power of the image and its representation by a playful perspective, generating an echo within the exhibition itself. Bruno di Rosa writes about the creators quest and the passing of time in the context of a rare object, an electric lyre.

Setting in harmony these infinite variations, Xavier Noiret-ThomŽ has also opted to air the Vexations by Erik Satie, 18 notes played 840 times. O...to take an interest in Satie, one must be, first of all, disinterested, letting a sound be a sound and a man a man, abandoning illusions about ideas of order, expression of feeling, and all the other aesthetic sales-talk we have inheritedO, said John Cage who played this piece in its entirety for the first time in 1963 - 70 years after it was composed. Its interpretation will be constantly renewed and reformulated in a continuous movement irrevocably distorted by time and distance.

The renowned artist Sherrie Levine has stated about her OappropriationistO work that Oa picture is a tissue of quotationsO and that Othe birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.O Maybe the virtue of this work resides in doubt? Does the artist not instil doubt of his common sense in the viewer, playing with the history of painting and its current status, sidestepping and distorting the representation of the painting as a window on the world by making it a Otrap-painting?

Eand on to the Discotheque, Comrade? is the name of an on-site intervention created by Philippe Decrauzat in cooperation with Scott King and James Fry, which will be on view in Fri-Art as of May 19 and until 2009. As a follow-up to Komakino, created for the Mamco, Philippe Decrauzat wished to fashion a monumental wall painting with a flexible and random structure in an intermediary vertical space. This space, which links the two exhibition areas as well as the inside and the outside, unfolds geometrical shapes built according to the motifs of a wooden parquet, a concert floor. Its units form an entity with a regular and symmetrical order that the artist adjusts and deregulates in a variable process, developing his own semantic system. The modules are freed of their context. They multiply, add on to or subtract themselves from the surrounding space. Developing new vanishing points, both open and closed upon an imaginary yet very real universe, the artist shakes up our perception of the place and of its verticality by confronting it with composite worlds. He also adapts it by proposing to Scott King and James Fry to implant and superpose the social and political universe of the subculture, favouring a counter-culture with its subversive values.

Opening: 19 May 2006 from 6 pm to 12 pm

Fri-Art
Petites-Rames 22 - Fribourg
Hours: ma-ven 14-18h, sa -di 14-17 h nocturne je 18-22 h

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