calendario eventi  :: 

X

1/6/2007

Three exhibitions

Yvon Lambert, Paris

Andres Serrano + Jason Dodge + Charles Sandison

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Andres Serrano

"The Morgue – Part II"

You can not want to consider this death, not want to think about it. But if you accept, if you admit intimately that your death touches you, then undeniably these photos concern you. And in their sincere and profound stake, they are serious, in the full and ancient resonance of this term: gravitas: weight, strength, dignity, elevation, nobility, solemnity - but also hardness, rigor, awkwardness, malaise, heaviness. Andres Serrano's grand photographic images are not light. Like all art according to Klee, but coyly and almost explicitly, they play with the ultimate ends.

Andres Serrano explained himself on his work, his choices, his way of working. His work is instinctive ; he himself is often surprised by the result: the finished work differs from what he had anticipated. Contemporary art criticism categories barely concern him because he places himself entirely within his own research. He feels himself more artist than technician-photographer, and for him, his photos are also his canvases. His Catholic education has played a decisive role in his progress but his method is not intellectual. It is, as he says, "natural": once his work is finished, the photo printed, when he looks at the work, then he sees the implicit culture. At that level, the gravity of his photos reveals his interest for everything that is rite and ritual ; the strange majesty that appears also has to do with precisely the fact that his models have no name; they're anonymous, gathered accidentally by their respective deaths, cut off from the world in a city's morgue, celebrated in the world by the photographer's work.

When he says that he doesn't really know the difference between what is and what is not acceptable, he doesn't mean to be deliberately provocative. Once again, it's rather a statement. But what is really shocking, first of all, in his work, is this instinctive incapacity to look as others do, as one should. There is something childish in this absence of criteria, in this ignorance of convention, in this tendancy of bringing his eye on what is at the margin of what can be seen, secondary, forgotten or neglected and making it the center of attention, the medium of a personal poetics. Childish, on the condition of understanding it as Baudelaire did when, in 1863, he spoke of the “recovered childhood” of the artist who knows “to see everything new” and whose art possesses something “barbarian and ingenuous”.

If provocation there is on the part of Serrano, it is that he demands us to look, eye to eye, at what we have a growing tendancy today to dismiss. not to want to know, not to envisage. In this mediatic and glamourous culture, you don't die anymore; the images of the body overwhelm us with their models of immutable youth and sumptuous and ascepticized beauty - and meanwhile, the inventor of American utopia, Disneyland, big Walt, is waiting, cryogenized, for his return to life. In this series, Serrano has chosen to envisage death and to give a face back to dead people. Photographic art puts in front of our eyes, close-up, the various aspects of the dead body, in its physical flesh, right there.

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JASON DODGE

Yvon Lambert is please to announce an exhibition with Jason Dodge opening June 2nd 2007, the artists first exhibition in the Paris gallery.

A weaver in Algeria makes a tapestry using yarn equaling the height of the weather — a Chimney sweep attaches a bell to his brush ringing it through the chimneys he cleans — the hands from a public clock are arranged to point north — a gold capsule filled with seeds of poison hemlock connect two rooms — an owl is prepared by a taxidermist with gems inside. The artist is involved with unusual collaborations the makers of the work are asked to see their unique speciality, location, or access through a different lens in order to create the works, and the work is made in private, based on instructions, or conversations, leaving the artist, similar to the viewer must rely on the faith that what has been asked, has in fact taken place.

In the work INTO BLACK six different people, one from each continent, were asked to expose a piece of photographic paper to the sunrise of the vernal equinox. This paper, never developed, increasingly turns grey with each minute it is exposed to light, and with this continuous transformation into black describes a journey from each continent to Paris. EDITH H. ILMANEN consists of a piece of writing — 10 homing pigeons originating from Paris delivered the text from Berlin over Germany and France to Paris, each pigeon has carried only one line of the text.

In Berlin two violists performed THE COMPLETE VIOLA DUOS OF BELA BARTOK in private on a new sets of strings, after the performance the strings were removed, presuming that they contain only the history of that piece of music.
Dodges work tries to imagine the hidden history of things. By choreographing different activities of theft, performance and making. His work appears on one hand as objects, a bell, the strings of a Viola, the mark left on a wall by a door, but the history of these things are what has defined them. Dodges work is about imagining geography, and distances, time and people. The work always declares what it is literally, and while this is true, the intimacy the work implies seems to clearly be where meaning lies.

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CHARLES SANDISON
"Utopia"

Yvon Lambert is please to announce an exhibition with Charles Sandison opening June 2nd 2007, the artists first exhibition in the Paris gallery.

‘Utopia’, 2007 a new work for Yvon Lambert Paris is a living poetical treatise. Utopia (derived from the Greek 'ou' for "no" and '-topos' for "place" "a perfect place" a fictional, non-realistic place) is an imaginary island, depicted by Sir Thomas More in a text published in 1516 as a perfect social, legal, and political system. In a negative meaning it refers to a society that is unrealistic. It has also been used to describe actual communities founded in attempts to create an ideal society.

The artist Charles Sandison uses a combination of language, architecture, and technology to create immersive data projection installations that place the viewer at the centre of a changing universe of words, signs, and characters. Grammatical structure is replaced by movement and interaction between the computer generated texts. Complex visual narratives that often only exist for a passing moment invite the viewer to perceive the work of art as an idea encapsulated in a moment in time. The work is running in real-time, during each moment of the exhibition the works are trying to prove the mathematical probability for society to exist as a utopia. In the same way that analysts use computer processing to predict the direction of the stock market or forecast the weather this art work computes the possibility of humanistic, socialist, democratic, and religious values ever becoming mutually compatible in such a way as to crate a contemporary ‘Utopia’.

Six elements, each relating to one of the six utopian concepts envisaged by Thomas More are in constant change and dialogue, occupying the gallery as projections, drifting across the walls they collide, intertwine, and negate each other. Occasionally loosing parts or shedding elements that briefly become independent before fading away. No two moments are ever identical as each element competes and interacts.
The entire surface of the gallery becomes a panoramic screen allowing the digitally generated text projections to move freely throughout the space. The movement of the words is governed by computer genetic algorithm programs written by the artist.

Genetic algorithms are implemented as a computer simulation in which a population of abstract representations (called chromosomes or the genotype or the genome) of candidate solutions (called individuals, creatures, or phenotypes) to an optimization problem evolves toward better solutions.

The six works communicate with each other via a wireless network that generates a radio signature that extends outside the building, occasionally a work will drift invisibly outside the gallery into the surrounding streets.

Image: Andres Serrano

Yvon Lambert
108 rue vieille du Temple - Paris
Admission free

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