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21/3/2007

Two exhibitions

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

David Noonan

Owls, shadow-plays, abandoned houses and other memory glitches
An Australian artist based in London, David Noonan combines film, painting, silkscreen, photography, sculpture, installation, and collage. Owls, shadow-plays, abandoned houses, Indonesian puppets, cults and counter-cultures, each turned into deconstructed fragments, inform a universe that is inspired by ancient traditional rituals and folkloric mythologies as well as by the more sinister world of the occult. His images are like silhouettes, visible only in part and suspended outside of a clearly identifiable time period, place, or colour. The atmosphere is often sombre, but maintains a delicate and poetic sensibility that makes use of the porous and accidental nature of memory to propose an engaging anonymity: how do we remember that which we only partly understand?

For his first exhibition in France, David Noonan presents a group of large new silkscreens , new collages, as well as a selection of recent silkscreens, collages, gouaches, and sculpture. The new works, most of which are more than 3 by 2 meters in size, feature images silkscreened on linen or directly onto birch plywood. While his sources are anonymous, the artist focuses on scenes of ritualistic gatherings, theatrical role-playing, or masked figures. Although making use of a 1970s aesthetic, the works remain too out-of-focus, storyless, and ambiguous to become nostalgic or historical. In creating composites of found photographs juxtaposed on top and inside of each other, Noonan uses a visual language that confuses narrative with abstraction and that allows people to become patterns, and vice-versa.

At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist conceives a site-specific display system that merges space, sculpture, and surface, adding yet another dimension to his practice. In a gallery measuring more than 300 square meters, an arrangement of fabric-covered panels and wooden support structures creates a system of wall fragments and an architecture of interruptions, déjà-vu's, and physical silhouettes. The flattening process that occurs in the artist's image-collaging is ultimately reversed, and the ghost-like protagonists of his invisible play are brought back into real space via this system of stand-alone props. With a newfound site-specificity and consideration of architectural constructs, this exhibition allows Noonan to extend his practice to new territories and experiment with a more complex tension between surfaces, images, and how they inhabit places.

David Noonan has presented his work in solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2006) ; HOTEL, London (2005) ; Foxy Production, New York (2004) ; or Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (2002, 2003, 2005), and the Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne presented David Noonan : Films and Paintings 2001-2005 in 2005. He has participated in group shows at Tate Modern, London (2006) ; PBICA, Palm Beach, FL (2005); The Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (2004) ; Tate Britain, London (2003) ; Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2002) ; Istanbul Biennial (2001) ; and Witte de With, Rotterdam (1999), among others.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body. Special thanks to Foxy Production, HOTEL, David Kordansky Gallery, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Uplands Gallery, and the lenders to the exhibition.


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Daniel Dewar and Gregory Gicquel

Sculptures, tuning, hand-mades, ready-mades and haikus…
A duo of unusual sculptors, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel cultivate the art of telescoping allied with a popular and hybrid conception of the work of art. Since they presented their portable sawmill Echo PPK, and various “hand-made” objects – Nike shoes, a BMX bicycle frame – the work of Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel has gradually shifted towards different areas, different formal worlds, while remaining attached to the practice of sculpture and the production of “ready-hand-mades”. How is it possible to come up with a work that involves both craftsmanship and industry, art and design, pop and conceptual art? These are the questions the two Frenchmen seem to ask, not hesitating to use multiple references to the world of popular hobbies such as fishing, surfing, car tuning/styling and skating. Nineteenth-century Japanese culture also serves as a source of inspiration in their approach, reflected in some of the titles of their works that come in the form of short poems, or haikus: La couleur vert détachée de la montagne suit le mouvement de la truite prise (Sekite Hara) [The silhouetted green of the mountain follows the movement of the caught trout] is the title of an improbable totemic sculpture combining wood and wool. Thus through a universe that is simultaneously conceptual, narrative and close to science-fiction, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel succeed in creating stories involving an elephant and a geisha, a car and a piercing or even a pearl necklace and motorbike helmets, overturning the codes of contemporary sculpture in the process.

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel have collaborated since studying together at Art College in Rennes. Their work has already been exhibited at Frac Pays de Loire, the Galerie Edouard Manet in Gennevilliers, 40 M CUBE in Rennes and more recently at Instants Chavirés in the context of the Seine Saint Denis Biennial. The exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is their first solo exhibition at a Paris institution.

Image: David Noonan

Opening: march 22, 2007

Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du President Wilson - Paris

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