calendario eventi  :: 

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25/1/2008

Two exhibitions

Air de Paris, Paris

Torbjørn Rødland
Go to the VIP Room

Air de Paris has the pleasure of presenting a new body of work by Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland. Rødland has long concentrated on mise en scène of selected objects, Romantic landscapes and individuals isolated in dumb beauty. Behind the apparent ordinariness of these images lies a certain strangeness shot through with mysticism. Over the last four years Rødland has also been working with video, using smoothly linked sequences to produce an effect of slowed-down perception. In the series Go to the VIP Room the artist abandons spatiotemporal unity in order to construct the mythical space that has obsessed him since his beginnings. Go to the VIP Room presents an overlay of fields resulting from successive exposures of a large-format negative. The composition takes shape on the matrix, the images combining artefactual and organic elements, reflections of light and areas of deep darkness. Gradually these landscapes draw us into their world, where night and day merge and the lit zones mix the descriptive and the decorative. The photographs do not make up a continuous sequence: rather they interact in their sharing of a static equilibrium and silence. In three of them the same diaphanous face provides a timeless presence, while in another a dark hole signals the disappearance of a human figure. Go to the VIP Room is a "post-mystical" fantasy, a sensitive evocation of a retro-futuristic world.

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M/M Paris
L’île au trésor

"The Treasure Island" is a pirate fantasy, an adventure starting in 2003, involving the rehabilitation by M/M of some abandoned manuscripts, found in the street before the garbage men passed by: novellas, beginnings of novels, and the letters to publishers accompanying them. "Rehab": these unselected excerpts have been transcribed with a great deal of care and attention, using a specific typography, a layout as for an anthology, a de luxe tome for bibliophiles with refined binding. It is presented in a small reading cabinet, a dedicated piece of furniture, which unfolds, a library of just one book, and a reading nook for just one reader. This latter is placed on a printed carpet, surrounded by heat-moulded Plexiglas frames, which cover engravings alluding to the nomadic pleasures of reading.

These same engravings, in which, for example, there appear the pirate/corsair writings of Pasolini, punctuate the book like an adventure novel. The title, borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson, conjures up a pirate figure and evokes issues involving royalties, issues rocking the digital age: the book's contents are all stolen, to put it in a nutshell. As the inhabitant of an island, a small pixellized pirate intervenes as a digital mascot disguised as a light sculpture. And if you take a closer look, the heat-moulded Plexiglas of the frames, which encircle the reading cabinet, bear the positive imprint of this little pirate. Last of all, as the last circle, the walls are covered with wallpaper, which borrows the motif of the flyleaves. Like a Moebius strip, the inside is also outside. The head turns to the bibliophile: this book has a worm hole with spherical symmetry! Gutenberg revolution permitted the production of books aimed at the largest possible readership. The Gutenberg galaxy has seen the critique of the swapping relations between the medium and the message, and this reference is still pertinent.

A few snippets of texts, which have not been used for the printing, are here rehabilitated with extreme seriousness. A copy of this installation is also being shown at the Alexandre Dumas Lycée in Moscow. Mastery, contemporary vanitas, absurd tribute, dialectic of form, or poetic drift?

Opening january 26, 2008

Air de Paris
32 rue Louise Weiss - Paris
Free admission

stampa

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