The artists take part in the construction, or reconstruction, of narratives that are linked to a personal and/or collective history. Through paintings, cut-outs, drawings and sculptures, they proceed to an actual translation of images and words.
Artists:
Giulia Andreani
Morgane Denzler
Sandra Lorenzi
Leopoldo Mazzoleni
Erwan Venn
A thought that never changes
Remains a stupid lie
It’s always been just the same
No hearing, nor breathing
No movement, no calling
Just silence.
New Order – Your Silent Face [Power, Corruption & Lies – 1983]
Since birth until our last days we carefully arrange, store, classify or conceal the traces of our lives. Vain, yet vital, these personal and intimate
archives reveal our own history: diaries, photographs, letters, postcards, fetish objects, books. These are documents that fill albums and boxes,
hard drives and CD-ROMS, and we absolutely need to preserve and save them, as they'll be the only ones to bear witness to our history, conferring
substance and a tangible reality to our memories.
Many artists work with archives. They may be related to their own lives, to their families, to strangers, or to the lives that are ours. To prevent them
from outright disappearance, they aim to give them visibility. It's than a matter of opening books and boxes, screens and archival storage devices
in order to run them through the filter of art and show them in a new light. Through paintings, cut-outs, drawings and sculptures, the artists proceed
to an actual translation of images and words. Thanks to them, we get to see a photograph of a group of Italian soldiers, postcards written during
World War I, anonymous photographs found at a market in Beirut, a box of black and white photographs collected by someone's aunt, pictures
gathered from archival collections, from the internet, or from history books. These documents have each gone through a process of appropriation
that offers them a new history and a new destiny. The process of appropriation allows for the introduction, not only of a degree of distance towards
the material, but also of a critical and revealing dimension. Giulia Andreani, Morgane Denzler, Sandra Lorenzi, Leopoldo Mazzoleni and Erwan
Venn take part in the construction, or reconstruction, of narratives that are linked to a personal and/or collective history. While some are looking
for a truth or a new understanding of a specific story, others use images and texts to generate new narratives.
(Julie Crenn, translation FRANK'S)
Painter and art historian, Giulia Andreani (born in 1985, Mestre, Italia) combines stories and images with relevance. For a few years now she
constitutes what she calls her «atlas » made out of pictures gathered from the internet as well as stills from Italian movies that marked the Rose
Neorealism, press archive pictures and other found images.. More surprisingly, she finds her inspiration in modern and contemporary art. She
reinterprets images and works with the same colour palette, blue, grey. She works with figuration, blur, delicate drippings and intentional erasures.
Also,her paintings contain messages to decode and characters to decrypt. These images lead to economical, political and cultural associations
inducing a sharp critique of our society.
More informations on http://giuliaandreani.blogspot.fr/
Morgane Denzler’s photographic work (Born in 1986, in Maison-Laffites) is based on a reflection about the history and the memory of a place, a
country, a people or a group. She goes to meet landscapes and people to feed her projects . In Beirut, she collects pictures at a market. At the
beginning she knows nothing about these quiet and anonymous pictures. Then she realises that she is constituting a collection of photographs
stolen and torn away from Lebanese families. Who are these people ? Where did these scenes took place ? What do these pictures mean?
The artist begins an investigation to find out the stories behind these forgotten lives Should her research be unsuccessful, she chooses then to
get challenge "the truth" by talking with people suffering from Alzheimer disease. With new truths coming out, a reconstruction occurs through
words and image puzzles.
More informations on http://www.morganedenzler.com/
Sandra Lorenzi’s worksderive from philosophical questions related to space, body and time. As an extension to these questions, she creates
spaces for reflection, initiation and experimentation. as. Collectio (2012 - in process) is an evolving piece, a collection of post cards written and
posted during the First World War. These cards found on flea markets are carefully and sympathetically read by the artist and then coldly and mechanically censored. On the front page : she removes all kinds of iconography referring to the war (weapons, damaged buildings, ruins, wounded
people, etc.).
At the back : she extracts the words and sentences referring to the ongoing conflict (precise descriptions, injuries, opinions etc.). By a simple
scissor cut, the artist erases the violence and the harshness of the war. She causes a reflection about the construction of History (« What does
remain ? »), the reconstitution of memory andour relationship with time.
More informations on http://www.sandralorenzi.com/
Since 2011, Leopoldo Mazzoleni (born in 1953 in Catania, Italy) has worked from a photograph. A black and white, small format image presenting
a group of Italian soldiers from the First World War. Among these men in uniform is the father of his partner. A man whose story and body blend
into the group. The artist seeks to reveal the individual by extracting the details, that bear witness to an individual person : hands, faces, feet,
bodies. Everything except the uniform leads to difference. He proceeds to several designed and filmed interventions. In an almost obsessive way,
he pencils the details. By separating the men, Leopoldo Mazzoleni wants to highlight the individual stories embedded in a picture, which in itself,
deals with a story, the story of a war.
More informations on : http://www.2248m2.com/2012/03/leopoldo-mazzoleni.html
The entire artistic practice of Erwan Venn (Born in 1967, in Rennes) is based on a memory-centered and sensitive exploration. For this, he questions his education, his foundations, his references and all the ingredients of an intimate and personal construction. The series Headless is born
from the artist’s desire to undertake a family archeology to decrypt ideological mechanisms and their inevitable impact on his own life. Following
the death of an aunt he gets a box of negatives. He gathers them and puts them aside. Later, he discovers a document from the year 1940 from
which he learns that his grandfather has collaborated with Nazi Germany by selling wine to the German soldiers settled in Britain. This terrifying
document is at the same time the trigger for further research. Erwan Venn returns to the negatives to observe them carefully, to decode the clues
(places, identities, events) and retrace the story of his grandfather.
More information on / http://www.erwanvenn.net/
Vernissage friday january 10, 2014 h 18h
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30, rue des Envierges 75020 Paris
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