calendario eventi  :: 

X

31/1/2007

M, Nouvelles du monde renverse'

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Solo show + special projects

Michel Blazy - Post Patman
1 feb - 6 may

An exhibition born out of organic proliferation.
Michel Blazy is an artist of the uncontrollable. Unstable developments and biological alterations give rise to a changing plastic universe in which time is a leading player. For Post Patman the artist begins with his work Patman, which was on view in the Palais de Tokyo’s preceding exhibition 5’000’000’000 YEARS. Throughout this new project, the artist regularly alters and nourrishes the works, thus intervening within the process of the exhibition itself.

Michel Blazy works with living matter. He places it at the centre of his artistic output and lets it “do its work". Evolving arrangements and ephemeral installations enable him to explore the uncontrolled proliferation of micro-organisms whose metamorphoses, transformations and changes of state are all factors necessary to the activation and development of the work - development understood in its most concrete sense.

A builder of random, fragile universes, Michel Blazy likes to manipulate materials, to attempt to control their disappearance and transformation, or on the contrary to be completely dependent on them. The micro events to which the adventure gives rise are crucial to the unfolding journey: instances of intentional or accidental germination, of the desiccation and decline of materials, of microscopic molds and rots, of the deterioration of surfaces, of the degeneration, transmutation or decrepitude of forms - all these febrile energies of living matter are claimed by the artist as operations crucial to the elaboration of the work.

Living matter is inconceivable without multiple mortiferous energies, metamorphoses and a great many oddities. The artist’s works integrate that complexity, which unfold with all its ambiguities, and its sometimes disturbing, even repulsive character. Spiders, an animal skin, a hunting trophy, an atomic mushroom, skeletons… all sculptures made of edible materials that form a strange bestiary, a cabinet of paradoxical curiosities. Static if viewed from a certain angle, the artist’s work is in fact inhabited by a multitude of minute movements that constantly at every instant make and unmake forms, disconcerting our categories of perception, as well as those of the art world.

An exhibition by Michel Blazy is experienced over time, by interrelating different moments, and by reading the links between the successive cycles. For the Palais de Tokyo, the artist is offering a project that is constructed step by step, in time and space. A permanent laboratory in which his experiments are installed, the place takes shape slowly, under the constant supervision of the artist. Observation of the upheavals, participation by the senses, transformation of the spaces, each of these elements will be a crucial stage in decoding the whole, like a succession of snapshots of a story with no end: by means of alchemies with an uncertain outcome, the artist gives us an inspired reading of that story.

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Joe Coleman
1 feb - 11 march

An obsessive pictorial universe embracing madness, holiness and serial killers
An artist, performer, musician and actor, Joe Coleman is a legendary New York figure. Playing with pathological obsession and a fascination for psychopathic tendencies, his dense and detailed paintings plunge viewers into an illuminated Gothic universe featuring cultural icons of violence, anti-heroes and historical figures. His works are more than simple portraits: they recount the lives and legends of their subjects (serial killers, the deranged, etc.) by adding texts, stories and a labyrinth of mini-scenes, rendering the reading of the images and text chaotic, all the while maintaining a highly structured and delicate compositional sense. His painting presents itself as an autopsy of the human condition - concentrating on its violent or demented side - which he dissects with a scalpel on the surface of a canvas.

Influenced in equal measure by Renaissance painting, medieval illuminations and crime comics of the 1950s, the artist replaces images of saints with contemporary figures of holy madness. His work exists in the tradition of painters like Bosch, Bruegel, Grunewald or Goya who were also inspired by madness, trauma or suffering. To this awareness of loss and human fear, Coleman adds a dimension of humour and a pictorial intensity that is almost hallucinatory.

Indian Larry, Glory of New York, War Triptych, Joe’s Fear of Disease, Big Bang: these are among the titles of the pictures Joe Coleman presents at his first exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. A collection of twenty paintings by this self-taught artist provides an introduction to this world fed by obsessions and eccentricities. Mixing popular cultures and religions, the images of festival, war, paradise and hell seem like the extreme coordinates of a joyful world that is nonetheless haunted by perversity

This exhibition is presented in partnership with The Cartin Collection, Hartford, Connecticut and is curated by Steven Holmes. Since the 1980s, Joe Coleman had exhibited at various galleries in East Village in New York such as Limbo, Civilian Warfare and Chronoside. His work has also been shown at the American Visionary Art Museum, the Hieronymus Bosch Museum, the Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford, Connecticut, as well as the Seattle Contemporary Art Center. Coleman also maintains the Odditorium, his ongoing museum-like installation full of strange and disturbing objects including “vintage" weapons or taxidermy specimens.

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Tatiana Trouve' - Double Bind
1 feb - 11 march

A sculptural and architectural “double bind" that disturbs our logic of perception
In a structure covering a surface area of approximately 500 sq. m., Tatiana Trouve'’s installation Double Bind brings together a composite collection of sculptures - rocks covered with padlocks and copper weights, landscapes made from salt, spaces consisting of “black boxes", hybrid objects - playing on discrepancies and repetitions that conjure up the way memory fragments and flicks through space and time. She gradually establishes a “contradictory" path, offering visitors a destabilising experience, like a sort of “double bind". The “double bind", a concept that comes from communication theories, is a paradoxical double injunction that plunges the subject into a state of mental block, or even physical paralysis. Thus Tatiana Trouve' creates a universe determined by the repetition and displacement of reference points, a world within which each object gives a temporal dimension to space. Viewers of the work are seemingly led to make a choice, but first and foremost they are constrained to invent new systems for finding their bearings. Double Bind is an installation that offers many potential routes and disturbs our logic of perception. Following Polders in 2002 and her participation in the exhibition Notre histoire… in 2006, this is the third time Tatiana Trouve'’s work has been presented at the Palais de Tokyo, and she confronts visitors with a sculptural and architectural construct of staggering dimensions.

Constituting spaces conducive to the development of psychological phenomena and their deployment in time has been central to the work of Tatiana Trouve' ever since she created the Bureau d’Activite's Implicites (B.A.I.) (Office of Implicit Activities) in 1997. The B.A.I. is composed of Modules and Polders. The former are places of work and concentration: we do not quite know if their function is to identify or produce thoughts, or if they contain the traces of the artist’s activity, as if the genesis of the work also constituted its horizon. The latter are reduced-size spaces, enigmatic because they are composed of elements referring to heterogeneous universes: their changes in scale are systematically accompanied by the redefinition of a logic of space bearing all the marks of an oneiric experience.

Tatiana Trouve' has contributed to various collective exhibitions such as Clandestins at the Venice Biennale (2003), Configurations/Mode'les mode'les at the MAMCO in Geneva (2005) and Printemps de septembre in Toulouse (2006). In addition she has had several solo exhibitions, including the CAPC in Bordeaux. She is currently preparing two major solo exhibitions to be held in 2007 at the MAC/VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine and the Villa Arson in Nice.

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Peter Coffin - Music for plants
1 feb - 11 march
A greenhouse for plants and for live interventions by experimental musicians
For Music for Plants, the artist Peter Coffin presents his work Untitled (Greenhouse) (2002), a full-sized greenhouse installed at the Palais de Tokyo, and invites musicians to come and play for the plants. The polycarbonate greenhouse is filled with various types of plants illuminated by halogen grow lights. More than a place for plants to grow, Untitled (Greenhouse) also functions as a concert venue: dispersed within the vegetation is a sound system, an electric guitar, a keyboard, speakers, microphones, etc. The public is invited to enter the greenhouse and play music for the plants. Several times per week, Untitled (Greenhouse) welcomes a musician from the experimental scene who attempts to communicate with the plants. While scientific proof showing that the plants are reactive to music does in fact exist, this artistic project does not seek to validate scientific theories, as much as it establishes a creative dialogue between different forms of organic life and creates a site for a direct and ongoing engagement with plants that is intuitive, improvised, and undetermined.

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Peter Coffin - Grow Your Own
1 feb - 6 may

An Exhibition about Micronations, Model and Concept Nations
Organized by the artist Peter Coffin, Grow Your Own is an exhibition bringing together a wide selection of micronations, sovereign independent states, concept nation states, and secession movements. All are presented as a creative response to a global political climate. Coffin’s interest in this subject began in 2000 when he initiated his own independent nation and began collecting information about other such projects around the world. Grow Your Own is a newly expanded version of the exhibition on the same subject Peter Coffin curated in 2005 at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York in conjunction with Robert Blackson: We Could Have Invited Everyone.

Micronations are countries (often without territories) conceived by artists, eccentrics, malcontents or egocentrics. These merge the imaginary, the artistic and the real in their embrace of a parallel world, motivated by artistic and conceptual concerns, a dislike for paying taxes, an immoderate love of royal titles, or even the simple desire to create a new civilization. Not a thematic group exhibition, Grow Your Own is an artist project that blurs any ability to distinguish between art, politics, anarchy and fiction. The governments, societies and artists involved have created various recognizable symbols that range from seals, anthems, languages, mottos, constitutions, flags and all the icons with which they establish their sovereignty.

Thus projects by artists with international reputations (Michael Ashkin, IRWIN, Gregory Green or Atelier van Lieshout) are presented along with uniforms (Allison Smith), a coin-making machine (State of Sabotage), maps (Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland), national anthems (Empire of Aerica), documentary films, portraits of kings and queens from a micronations summit, flags, passports, stamps, coins or letters of citizenship from some forty nations including the Empire of Atlantium, the Principality of Sealand, or the Kingdom of Pinsk.

Applications for citizenship and naturalisation can be completed and filed by exhibition visitors.

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David Ancelin - Modules
1 - 25 feb

David Ancelin creates a repertory of multiple forms, sometimes mechanical, often no longer in working order. His offbeat, humorous universe confronts us with the loneliness of abandoned objects, bringing together varying incongruities: a buoy and concrete, a motor-cycling helmet and beads, etc. From felt sculpture to silk-screens, his works create unlikely catalysts for stories that remain to be invented.At the Palais de Tokyo, Ancelin presents Avis de grand frais, a rustic indoor installation. A rotary tiller (an agricultural tool used to turn the soil) dating from 1949 disrupts a floor made of terra-cotta tiles, creating an unlikely accidental collision between earth, man, and machine. A work of art that seems to have escaped the artist’s control, Avis de grand frais ploughs a furrow open to many interpretations. David Ancelin presented a one-person exhibition at the Espace Diderot (Nantes, 2006) and participated in group exhibitions such as L’Egosyste'me at the Confort Moderne (Poitiers, 2006) and L’Icone at the Dojo (Nice, 2005).

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Camille Henrot - King Kong Addition
1 - 25 feb

Camille Henrot is a passionate cinema lover and handles the universe and codes of cinematographic material as others do wood or paint. She seldom directs her own films, preferring to intervene in films made by other people using a variety of procedures: drawing, scraping on the film, or collage. Each of these techniques makes it possible to conjure up shadows, lights or ghosts and relay the work in the form of photographs, drawings, films or installations. Camille Henrot thus appropriates popular cinema, using poetry and imagination to bring it back into the experimental field. For the Palais de Tokyo, Camille Henrot is showing a project that has not been seen before: King Kong Addition. Neither a remake nor a misappropriation, this version of King Kong simply makes it possible to look at three versions of the Hollywood film (1933, 1976 and 2005) overlaid over one another. A legendary work, King Kong is first and foremost a film about the cinema and for the cinema. The end result of this mathematical addition is a disturbing film with blackened, sometimes illegible images, the opacity of which makes it truly a “screen", a screen on to which any and every fantasy can be projected. Only the two main figures in the film now stand out from this jungle of dark images: the gorilla and the female character. King Kong emerges from this obscurity and withstands the visual confusion. He also remains the figure spectators refuse to stop believing in, that monumental figure the cinema periodically resuscitates.

First discovered in the exhibition J'en reve at the Fondation Cartier, Paris, Camille Henrot has since developed a national and international career. She recently participated in the new media Biennial Version Anime'e at the Centre pour l'image contemporaine in Geneva as well as the Nuit Blanche 2006. In 2005, her work was presented, among other places, at the Galerie Dominique Fiat, the Atelier du Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the Hara Museum in Tokyo.

Image: Joe Coleman, I am Joe's Fear of Disease, 2001

Opening: 1 february 2007

Palais de Tokyo
13, av. du Pre'sident Wilson - Paris

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