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24/6/2010

Jorge Satorre

Le Grand Cafe' Centre d'art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire

Jorge Satorre's way of working, rooted in an evident enjoyment of narrative, comes from historical and oneiric inquiry, detective work and poetic rereading. The artist lays claim to the freshness of the experimental, foregrounding the research process and effort that it involves. His usual modes of presentation (drawings, videos, performances) work by suggestion: tools for recovering a memory rather than faithful documents that would allow an event or the history of a place to be retraced. They function as subjective attempts at interpretation.

As a measure of this desire to elucidate from the inside, Jorge Satorre at times appropriates particular seminal events of the history of art (Chris Burden's performance Shoot, or Gordon Matta Clark's Windows blow out), replaying the action in an unspectacular manner or making himself the obstinate critical interpreter. The artist also revisits a number of local stories on the way to being forgotten. He records the memory of a dying village (Piaxtla, on the Mexican border, in 2009) or an old van that the inhabitants of the Irish island of Sherkin erected as a monument (The Barry's Van Tour, 2007), he sends stones on journeys (The erratic. Measuring compensation, 2009) or decodes their mythical value (My Dolmen, 2007-2008): the artist grasps the impact of recollection (collective or personal) and the construction and fictionalisation of histories. His drawings and films are thus considered as hybrid receptacles, emotionally very highly charged, weighing up the phenomena of migration (of populations, of objects) and mutation (functional and symbolic) that regulate our world.

In Saint-Nazaire Jorge Satorre will renew with his 2010 residence and exhibit a particular group of works (drawings, photographs, texts and videos) closely tied to the geographical context and the relationship between the port and its past.

The exhibition title, The Indirect Gaze, refers to a term in astronomy: it describes the method used for observing the subtle changes in brightness of exoplanets, objects infinitely distant from our solar system. This could be compared with the method Jorge Satorre has developed in recent years in attempting an interpretation of radically unknown or foreign places, such as Saint-Nazaire appeared to him during his initial visits. The site-specific thought processes of his projects include the revelation of a hidden history, linked to the construction of now-spectral great ocean liners, to the murky fate of civic statuary and to an inventory of the presumed locations of long-lost dolmens in and around Saint-Nazaire.

Contemporary:

Etienne Pressager
Divagations
A work from the FRAC Bretagne Collection

Image: Jorge Satorre, La part maudite illustrée (detail), 2009-10. 33 offset plates and 90 gouache paintings on wood 20 x 14.5 cm each (with the collaboration of Jorge Aviña). Courtesy Gallerie Xippas, Paris and Labor, Mexic

Private view June 25 at 6.30pm

Le Grand Cafe Contemporary Art Centre
Place des Quatre z'horloges
F 44 600 Saint-Nazaire
Place des Quatre z'horloges
F 44 600 Saint-Nazaire
Summer: open everyday except Monday, from 11am to 7pm
Free acces

stampa

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