calendario eventi  :: 

X

1/4/2008

Artparis 08

Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris

...a reflection of the artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries

Between the 3rd and the 7th of April, artparis will celebrate its 10th year at The Grand Palais. On this occasion, it will showcase the work of 115 of the most vibrant French and foreign galleries that appear to be particularly representative of the international modern and contemporary art market. With more than 40% of participants coming from outside France and a renewal of 95% of its galleries within 9 years, artparis has become an unmissable event on the European artistic scene.

For its 10th edition, artparis will present a thematic exhibition, specifically dedicated to emblematic artists and emerging talents of the Arab world. The contemporary art of this region, which appears to be a perfect synthesis between East and West, and which still is not as well-known as it ought to be, will be displayed in its complexity and variety of styles. This exhibition featuring the confrontation of multiple influences at the intersection of African, Asian and European cultures, was organised with the support of Brahim Alaoui, curator of the exhibition and art historian.

Artparis 2008 invites a dialogue between different artistic styles. In so doing, it echoes artparis-AbuDhabi whose first edition, last November, was a tremendous success, with more than 9 000 visitors and collectors attending this multicultural event.

Numerous are the artparis 08 exhibitors honoring Figuration Narrative artists, echoing throughout the exhibit that will inhabit the Galeries Nationales of the Grand Palais from April 16. This movement took shape in the 1960s in highly varied pictorial forms and with the impetus of highly diverse personalities who, nevertheless, share a common engaged vision of humanity face to face with its society. Nearly 40 years later, these artists are still holding their own!

The painter Erró was the most virulent at denouncing war and the excesses of totalitarianism, right from the onset mixing disparate figurative elements such as news photographs, comic strips, advertising illustrations, and masterpieces of classical art. By poking fun at the multitude of images that govern us, he responds with a profusion of colors and information all the while criticizing the consumer society, politics, advertising, and even… art! The Louis Carré & Cie gallery is honoring him with a one-man show consisting of small recent paintings. Today, at the age of 76, this Icelandic painter is having fun mixing the greats of art history, such as Picasso or Fernand Léger, with the world of pop culture.

As a cofounder of Figuration Narrative in 1964, Bernard Rancillac is being honored with a one-man show at the Lélia Mordoch gallery. This retrospective runs from the 1960s to the current time and allows us to appreciate the various series of this artist, born in 1931, who has never allowed himself to be coopted by any particular style. Starting in 1963, he contrived a kind of graphic candor combining the legacy of Cobra with the initial aspirations of Pop Art. Indeed, one of the works presented at the stand is a direct homage to Rauschenberg, and one silk screen is strongly reminiscent of a certain… Andy Warhol. Just like those American artists, Rancillac draws upon comic strips or magazine photos, to which, starting in 1966, he adds volumes of plastic material. Caustic humor characterizes all of his works up to the current day.

Another hero of this movement, Valerio Adami, is present with Daniel Templon. Starting with expressionist figuration and a gestural treatment, he came to Figuration Narrative via a revisited pop art. He then developed a kind of fanciful and humoristic narrative in the form of comic strips that are also evocative of shooting scripts. Color is applied in flat tints carefully delimited with black lines in a mosaic structure. The strangeness of the scenes does not reside so much in the artist’s treatment, which is recognized in a glance, but rather in the narrative ambivalence, still intact after 40 years of work. Adami brings the obsessions of the collective unconscious to the forefront, ranging from mythological themes to the avatars of the conditions of contemporary life.

Gallery owner Sonia Zannettacci has for years been promoting the work of Jacques Monory. His latest series reconnects with his fetish blue color and adopts the themes of cars, California, the detective genre, and the totally autobiographic man in the hat… Still, the painter, born in 1936, has yet to abandon his first love and leads us deep into the heart of the 1960s. Monory starts with photographic images and the paintings of this great cinephile function like a screen. He contemplates time, the future, and therefore death, which infuses his images with a muted uneasiness.

Peter Klasen, another partisan of Figuration Narrative, is represented by the Italian gallery San Carlo. This German painter born in 1935 also provides a cold clinical view of daily life using a smooth, impeccable, quasi-photographic treatment. He created what some critics at the time dubbed “modern coats of arms, emblems without a code.” His simplified compositions generally portray two elements of reality that destroy each other. Functional objects, such as sinks, telephones, switches, razors, and hammers, are associated with erotic symbols such as leather, belts, bandages, or a portion of a breast symbolizing the objectified woman or the cover-girl. But Klasen is not cruel; he comes across as threatening because he is himself threatened. Under the cover of bright colors falsely symbolizing the joy of living, the works of these plastic artists denote a certain uneasiness in a continually meaningful world.

From Figuration Narrative to Pop Art is just a small step easily made by numerous galleries. “Pop Art,” which was born in the United States in the 1960s, is derived from popular culture and aims to be in close relationship with mass culture. Emblems of the American consumer society, references to comic strips, and elements borrowed from advertising are abundant. The compositions are simple and the colors are bright, positively portraying a world that is joyful, playful, economically strong and open to all sensual pleasures…

Tom Wesselmann, who died in 2004, has since been knighted by dealers. His work is divided into two major series : large female nudes and still life works conceived from found objects and images cut out of magazines. The genesis of his career was established in the 1960s and would remain identical until the very last paintings, although he did evolve with regard to technique. The image of America in the sixties that emanates from these lascivious figures and elements of daily life is perhaps falsely idealized, but it nevertheless marked generations. The Pascal Lansberg gallery is offering a sample of a Wesselmann still life with rose and cigarette dated 1969. As for Laurent Strouk, he baptized his stand USA. An erotic nude by Wesselmann sets the tone in good company with Andy Warhol, perhaps the most famous author of the movement, symbolized here by a representation of the dollar ! How amusing when we know that more than twenty years after his death, this artist is still breaking sales records. Robert Indiana, creator of the famous sculpture Love who worked extensively on the letter and immediacy of symmetry in colors and shapes, and Keith Haring, a lyricist of the graphic and pictograms, are also present at the festivities. Right from the start, these artists sought to speak to a broad audience through a simple, universal language and themes that they are still applying today.

Another emblematic figure of Pop Art, Mel Ramos, is being presented simultaneously by the Rive Gauche gallery, the German gallery Levy, and Patrice Trigano. Born in California in 1935, in his early career he draws inspiration from the imagery of American comics and depicts effigies of Batman and Flash Gordon. Next, he addresses the theme of pinups, which he would never abandon. He combines them with various consumer articles or cigars… and portrays them as paintings or sculptures in full volume… Feminists beware!

Now, for a return to France with the Christophe Gaillard gallery, which is devoting his stand to the New Realists, sometimes called the French pop artists. Historical works by Arman, César, Christo, Deschamps, or Villeglé provide a review of this movement, which was created in 1960 by Pierre Restany. The works by these artists have in common an omnipresence of certain items of urban life : posters, fences, vacant lots, garbage, cars, or traffic signs, which have defined what Restany christened “the poetry of urban civilization.”

In a completely different style, the Cobra movement was historically short but highly influential. Founded in 1948 and completed—officially—in 1951, it consists of the first letters of COpenhagen, BRussels, and Amsterdam, the capitals of the countries from which the primary artists came : these include Corneille, Karel Appel, and Alechinsky, the winning trio whose works adorn the walls of the stand of the Belgian André Simoens gallery. The Lasés gallery is showing a sample of Corneille’s production from 1949. At that time, he was breaking away from his Picasso influences, which had impacted his beginnings, in order to move toward a freer design. The tones are still dull, but they would evolve toward increasingly warm nuances.

Die galerie, an exhibitor from Frankfurt, is offering La Ville by the same author, likewise from the 1940s. This work is all the more rare given that the market features more of his later production in which the Belgian painter was characterized by the use of women, birds, dogs, and cats. This same gallery is featuring Personnages by Karel Appel, a Dutch painter who developed a summary form of writing in his beginnings inspired by children’s drawings and driven by aggressive tones. His paintings are always animated by an expressive and violent touch rich with material, sometimes with a quasi-dissolved pattern ultimately giving way to the vitality of the brush. A recent work by the Belgian Alechinsky entitled Terril rounds off the presentation. Pierre Alechinsky was the youngest member of the group and combined painting and engraving in his work from the very beginning. He often mixes free abstraction, consisting of large signs that he surrounds with small, much more figurative scenes called “marginal comments.” These little scenes are reminiscent of comic strips, especially since he includes his own brand of sarcastic humor unique to him in the group.

Lastly, two gallery owners have decided to pay homage to the Support/Surface group, a movement created in 1970 that questions the very materiality of painting. Bernard Ceysson is set up in Saint-Etienne and represents most of the founding members of this movement, to which Claude Viallat belongs. With no other subject apart from painting itself, he develops a practical and theoretical critique of the traditional painting. For instance, he starts by using un-stretched canvasses, threads, ropes, and knots, while his color is orchestrated on the basis of repeated stampings of shapes, a process that aims to reveal the painter’s approach. The image is nothing more than a reference to itself with no claim to any other meaning. One quickly recognizes his fetishistic shape in his work, a kind of bean protruding through the holes in his net, which he applies to various media.

The Hélène Trintignan gallery from Montpellier also offers several examples of this. The gallery rounds off its presentation with recent works by Daniel Dezeuze. Born in 1942, he has focused on the problem of the stretcher and experimented with numerous materials throughout his career: walnut stain, tarlatan, terracotta, ... in which empty space is as pregnant with meaning as the occupied space. He gives a further demonstration of this with Peinture qui perle consisting of mesh, iron wire, and pearls on flexible resin…

Press contact : Sylvia Beder - communication culture - Romane Dargent
tel : +33 (0)1 42 18 09 42 - fax : +33 (0)1 43 21 18 95
sylvia@sylviabeder.com ou communication@sylviabeder.com

Press Preview: Wednesday, April 2 12 am from 2 pm
Collector Preview: Wednesday, April 2 2 pm from 5 pm
Public Preview: Wednesday April 2 6 pm to 11 pm

Grand Palais
Avenue Winston Churchill 75 008 Paris
Daily from 11 am to 9 pm
Entrance fee: 15 euro (10 euro : artists and students)

stampa

permanent link