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25/1/2007

Emmanuelle Villard

CCNOA Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Bruxelles

screen 1 . 2 . 3 .

CCNOA center for contemporary non-objective art Brussels, Belgium, is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by French artist Emmanuelle Villard: Paint it, Black (main space), and a new video and multimedia program ‘screen’ featuring on a bi-weekly basis experimental video and multimedia works by international artists: ‘Dumpster’ by John Beech & Einar Westerlund (UK/USA), ‘Moving Light: Spring 2005’ by Erika Blumenfeld (USA), and ‘Meanwhile in the same place No. 8’ by Else Marie Hagen (N) (entrance). Paint it, Black

Imagine an era in which artists working in the field of abstraction are considered decorators and the primary quality of abstract painting is that it can be transformed into wallpaper or packaging for shampoo. Imagine further that in this era viewers have become accustomed to recognizing a picture before looking at it, their gaze travelling across the surface of the canvas as it would across the surface of an everyday world with which they feel totally familiar.

What would that leave painting?

The exhibition draws on a play on language constructed around the concept of what remains, what is left. First, left in the literal sense of the term: for we know that paint can be fluid, that it can run, trickle, drip, dislodge itself, spill over and out of the frame of the picture; that in its descent it can form drops, drips, diverse 'accidentals' extrinsic to the artistic intention; and that these remains, the 'residue' as it were of the picture, become an integral part of the work. And second, left in the figurative sense of the term: reflecting on the history of abstraction and the various formal shifts that lead it to flirt with decoration and design, I cannot but wonder what is there left of abstract painting today.

A dialogue between three propositions The first, which gives the exhibition its title, is a triptych. The picture has deserted the wall, leaving in its place a wall painting, 'disembodied', basic in form and execution. The 'body' of the painting is transposed to the piece in suspension, both design and baroque in its inspiration. It looks as if it has been immersed in paint and then left to drip, to dry very slowly, before being put on display. The floor piece is vertical to the suspended piece, marking the place taken up below it by this hypothetical dispersion of matter. And yet this residue creates on the floor a strange length of lace - something between a napkin and a carpet - as if, on coming into contact with the exhibition space, these pictural remains have been transformed into a composition that is essentially decorative. These shifts of sense and form between the three elements are also acted out in spatial terms: the composition as a whole, the quality of the different materials and the different qual ities of black change as the viewer moves around the exhibition space inciting him to observe not just from one but from many view points.

The two other propositons are pictures which play ironically and without complex on the seductive artifices associated with the fair, with show business. They draw on two 'classical' registers - the drip and the stripe - highlighted here by the use of glitter. Playing with the light and the angle of vision of the viewer the glitter 'illuminates' or 'extinguishes' the pictures as if they were everyday objects. Each of the propositions aims to question the way in which the viewer 'views', by multiplying his points of vision, both in the space itself but also by proposing a to-ing and fro-ing between the field of the abstract painting and the field of the object. But with special attention to the surface: as a 'trompe-l'oeil' or 'trompe-sens' and, by extension, as a tool for questioning perception. (Emmanuelle Villard, 2007)

For additional information, please contact Sacha Goerg sacha@ccnoa.org

CCNOA
Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art
Boulevard Barthelemylaan 5 - Brussels

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