Samuel Richardot
Gerard Byrne
Marcelline Delbecq
Peter Piller
Jozef Robakowski
Amie Siegel
Carolina Grau
On show Richardot's new paintings dating from his recent stay in Berlin, together with a large paper installation and the work of five artists that share an interest in the possibilities of presenting past and present, and blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. They investigate omitted footage, take new pictures and tell stories.
Samuel Richardot. Solo exhibition
La Galerie Centre for contemporary art in Noisy-le-Sec/Paris is inviting Samuel Richardot, a
painter born in 1982, for his first institutional solo exhibition. Since graduating from the Paris art
school in 2006, Richardot has been working with Balice Hertling in Paris, where he had a one
man show in 2008. He followed up the same year with the Printemps de Septembre festival in
Toulouse, France.
At La Galerie he will be presenting new paintings dating from his recent stay in Berlin, together
with a large paper installation.
From the very beginning, Richardot has drawn from expression of sensory qualities, each
element finding a possible origin into a fragrance, a touch, a sound, etc.: kinds of resurgences
that his memory associates to senses. Yielding painting that is figured without being figurative,
the vocabulary furnished by these "mental" images – mental in that they depict a virtual reality –
is a run-through of strangely familiar symbols we cannot quite pin down.
Some are taken from the
medical repertoire – bodily organs – while others are natural entities like branches, puddles and
stones reduced to their simplest state. More recent additions to the Richardot practice are the
outcome of such painting-related gestures and incidents as runs, stains, bubble wrap prints,
sticky tape, burns, etc.: controlled accidents conjuring up a history of process art.
The exhibition at La Galerie fans out from a hanging of works in which motifs painted on canvas
are to be found side by side with paper cut-outs. Deliberately subjected to the constraints inherent
in the use of standard formats – either large and horizontal (such as landscapes and screens) or
very small – Richardot's works juggle with changes of scale: from picture as overview to the detail
of each element depicted. Because emptiness looms large in these works, the forms seem to
emerge from a blank field.
Clearly contoured yet at the same time left incomplete, they are
created without any preliminary drawings; the result is works driven by a quest for spontaneity
while remaining, paradoxically, highly controlled.
Opening night Friday 18 September 6-9pm
Press preview 5-6pm
The artist will be present
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Another Point of View. Group exhibition
curated by Carolina Grau in the framework of La Galerie's annual residency for curators
"The exhibition 'Another Point of View' examines how artists work with images of the everyday and give them a different meaning. The artists search and investigate our cities and surroundings, making us stop and look at imagery that we have ignored and overlooked. Considering our world from new positions, they bring into focus small details as well as the big picture. 'Another Point of View' presents a new manner of viewing things, a new standpoint from which something is observed and a story is related, a different attitude.
The five artists in the exhibition share an interest in the possibilities of presenting past and present, and blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality. They investigate omitted footage, take new pictures and tell stories. We accompany them on their walks, drifting through the city, discovering street corners, shop windows and views from the tops of buildings." (Carolina Grau)
Annual residency programme for curators at Noisy-le-Sec / Paris, France
Since 2006, La Galerie has hosted foreign curators for an annual three-month residency, in order to support an exhibition in a French contemporary art centre and allowing a discovery of the Île-de-France contemporary scene (artists, professionals, other organizations…). The annual residency for curators at La Galerie is receiving the backing of DRAC Île-de-France (Ministry of Culture).
Carolina Grau is a Spanish curator. Selected by La Galerie's board via a call for application to achieve her project 'Another Point of View', she was in residence at Noisy-le-Sec from April to July 2010.
Opening night Friday 18 September
La Galerie - Contemporary Art Centre
1 rue Jean-Jaures, Noisy-le-Sec
Opening hours Tuesday to Friday: from 2 - 6pm
Saturday: from 2 7pm
Free entry