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27/1/2011

Alexej Meschtschanow / Renaud Regnery

Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris

Berlin/Paris
Klemm's @ chez Valentin's showroom, Paris

The interest in the examination of established social conventions, their aesthetic peculiarities and the according psychological questioning is common to the artistic practice of both Alexej Meschtschanow and Renaud Regnery.

The ambivalences and rejections, fractions and deformations are equally relevant and function as conceptual basis for the actual working process itself and the final expression of their work. The intense editing of the material is an important part for both artists – Regnery revises form and meaning of the ‘classic panel’, Meschtschanow combines in his work echoes of the ready-made with idiosyncratic, abstract form finding and narrative elements. Alexej Meschtschanow’s sculptures and installations are the result of an appropriating observation of our social habits. Studying our immediate social environments is as important to him as the examination of the “iridescent products of high-culture”.

These impressions reflect in Meschtschanow’s work. Even though the works are autonomous and apply as single works, Meschtschanow conjoins in the exhibition context the individual pieces to interacting ensembles or develops space-filling installations. Characteristically, Meschtschanow forces his carefully selected found objects and photographs together with idiosyncratic steel constructions in order to achieve an augmented and stabilized form of existence. In the duality of coercion and subjectivity, every clamp, clip or screw can be read as an intentionally employed, pseudo-functional ornament that isn’t to be trusted unobjectionably.

The term ‘ornament’, as one of the most disputed topoi in the beginning of the 20th century, plays a crucial role in Renaud Regnery’s work as well. Once conceived as a utopian idea of the harmonic relationship between man and nature, it was soon to be picked up by the industry and turned into its opposite – produced by the thousands and stuck to the homely wall as ordinary, replaceable wallpaper. In his ‘wallpaper paintings’ and ‘silk screen paintings’ Renaud Regnery is dealing exactly with this ambivalence. He isolates motifs, distances them from their origin by specific working processes and at last re-individualizes them by the painterly gesture. Regnery consciously forces disparate layers together, blurs traces and discloses new spaces. Although the canvas is treated rather laminary and with a constraint flow, the works develop nevertheless a strong physical presence that embodies in its result likewise a critical questioning and categorical assertion of the painterly process.

Against this background their joint exhibition in Paris is conceived as an interaction between picture and object, surface and body. The found furniture in Meschtschanow’s work is set in dialogue with the only slightly perceptible, ornamental patterns in the paintings of Regnery. The familiar image of a furnished room seems to be herewith suggested but this image is immediately abstracted to a great extent and rather serves as a projection space for the above-mentioned coherences than for a homely living-room ensemble. The choice of color and material – Meschtschanow’s varnished steel, broken glass and wood versus the abdumbrated materiality, shiny gold pigments and graffiti citations in Regnery’s work – even reinforces this impression.

Opening: Friday, January 28th from 4 - 9 p.m.

Galerie Chez Valentin
9, rue Saint Gilles, Paris
Tue - Sat / 11am - 7pm
Closed between / 1pm - 2pm

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