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19/4/2013

Gianni Motti / Jesper Just

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris

Galerie Perrotin is pleased to announce the first solo show by Gianni Motti at the gallery from 20 April to 15 June 2013.

In 2009, the financial crisis is in its full swing and hits head-on the industrialised countries leading the wreck of big banks, causing the markets to fall and threatens the worldwide economy. Suddenly “The Capital” of Karl Marx floats up to surface, even the liberal economists rediscover it quite openly as if the people were in desperate need of a philosophical explanation to the crisis. It is in this morose climate that the artist designs the “Moneybox” exhibition.
Instead of devoting the budget of the exhibition to carry out a piece, Gianni Motti suggests to spread it out in broad daylight, only the whole money allocated for the production is exhibited. The budget becomes the piece. A first version was displayed at the Centre d’art La Ferme du Buisson in Marne la Vallée in 2009, and a second version at the Migros Museum in 2012.

Mostly known for interventions designed to highlight the contradictions that inform contemporary society, Gianni Motti’s practice has questioned authority at every turn over the years by fully exploiting humour’s potentials as a truth- revealing weapon. This is the spirit that prompted him to replace the Indonesian delegate at the 53rd session of ONU’s Commission of Human Right in 1997, to sit in the VIP tribune of Paris’ Roland Garros with a bag over his head in 2004 at the time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, or to walk the 27 km that compose the LHC underground tunnel of CERN in 2005 in an attempt to challenge the speed of the beams running through the accelerator. His intelligent irony, coupled with a remarkably fresh perspective of the outsider variety, has also been extended to the dynamics that characterize the art system, as the legion of ‘Gianni Motti assistants’ he spread around the world or his first retrospective at the Migros Museum in Zurich, consisting of a long labyrinth leading from the main entrance to the back door, testify.

Motti has also been openly critical on global economy way before the mon- etary recession would make it a topical issue. On the occasion of Art Basel in 2005, he responded to the commercial vibe dominating the fair by caging a broker on the floor of the Unlimited section, staging an action that reprises the tradition of the living sculpture initiated by Piero Manzoni while painting a surreal yet dramatic picture of the limitations that regulate the business world at the same time. Ostensibly more comfortable in site-specific operational settings, Motti has investigated the matter further in Geneva in 2009, where he planted a series of white flags on the bridge in front of the city’s banking district, in what can be considered a gesture in between a declaration of total surrender or an invitation to start from a clean slate. Or, most recently, where he dressed a vegetable garden scarecrow like a banker, transforming the menacing financial figure into a still, fragile puppet willing to frighten but dependent on his victim’s fortunes.

This latter point is perhaps the subtext that lays at the core of Motti’s work. If examined at closed range, what surprisingly emerges from his corrosive outlook and scepticism is in fact a fundamental faith in the individual qualities of the human being – a combination of disruptive and constructive elements directed towards a celebration of independent thinking.

- Michele Robecchi

Gianni Motti was born in 1958 in Sondrio, Italy. He lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Jesper Just

Galerie Perrotin is delighted to announce an exhibition by Danish artist Jesper Just.

Jesper Just takes inspiration from the aesthetic of great film directors such as Dreyer and Bergman, Melville and Kazan. In his enigmatic films, devoid of dialogue, mastery of cinematic strategy is placed in the service of a narrative based on the panoply of human emotions, amplified by the masterly use of music. The films of this exhibition attest that Jesper Just continues and expands his ongoing examination of stereotypical representations of gender and race, architectural pastiche, cultural appropriation, and dislocation.

The exhibition includes Just’s latest film, “Llano” (2012), which is being shown in France for the first time. It is set in the ghost town of Llano del Rio, founded in 1913 by the socialist Job Harriman. The failure of irrigation and water supply finally caused the project, and the town, to be abandoned, nearly a century ago. We observe this desert and the vestiges of this utopian city in the sheeting rain. Soon, the camera shows us a set of pipes set up above the ruins. It is one of those contraptions typically used to create artificial rain on film sets. At the centre of all this, a woman struggles to prevent the collapse. Like Sisyphus pushing his rock, she replaces the bricks and stones falling from the already disintegrated structure. Several times, throughout the film the camera takes us to a dark and gloomy engine room that seems indefinably connected to the ruin. According to Just, “Llano is a ruin of a place that is no longer, but also a place that really never happened. Here, we have a double meaning—a strange mix of utopia and dystopia, filled with failure as well as potent ideals.”

In the second room is a film shot in Detroit, “Sirens of Chrome” (2010). In total silence, four Afro-American women drive around the deserted streets of the abandoned city. The palpable tension in the Chrysler reflects the disturbing atmosphere outside. When they come onto the roof of an old theatre, now a parking lot, another woman appears in the picture. Here begins a strange and spellbinding confrontation. As curator Jennifer Frias writes, “Just’s works are often emotionally charged with ambiguous narratives that never reach a moment of conclusion. Gender, relationships and identity are recurring themes in his work. (...) “Sirens of Chrome” , similarly takes on the complexity of the human condition, but shifts its focus on the representation and interpretation of African-American women and women in general.”

In the film shot in 16mm, “ A Vicious Undertow” (2007), a strange relationship is articulated in the meeting of gazes and dancing, through the sensuous leitmotif of the whistling that introduces them. “A Vicious Undertow” is built around a woman figure of uncertain age, whistling the tune of “Nights in White Satin” in a bar. The camera glides over her neck, her skin and her lips, and then approaches a second, rather young woman. A man joins them. In a succession of quick shots, the camera focuses on the older and the younger woman dancing a waltz together, then on the man, again with the young woman. Suddenly, the heroine stiffens and makes for the exit. Propelled in the middle of the night onto the steps of an endless staircase, she seems to be trying to escape melancholy or fate by moving through a space that is out of time.

This year Jesper Just will represent Denmark at the 55th Venice Biennale.

Jesper Just was born in Denmark in 1974. He lives and works in New York. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Danish Film School.

Among his recent exhibitions: the HEART - Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, the Sharjah Biennial 11, Sharjah, UAE, the Musée d’Art Con- temporain du Val-de-Marne MAC / VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA. Just’s work is featured in many public collections, including Guggenheim Museum (New York), MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), FRAC - Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain Champagne-Ardenne, Kiasma, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki Louisiana Museum, and many others.

Image: Gianni Motti, HIGGS, à la recherche de l’anti-Motti, 2005, CERN, Genève. Performance, Marche dans le LHC (accélérateur de particules) 27 km, 5h50. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong & Paris.

Press contacts
Héloïse Le Carvennec, Head of Press & Communication: heloise@perrotin.com + 33 1 42 16 91 80
Armelle Bellenger, Press Officer: armelle@perrotin.com +33 1 76 21 07 11

Galerie Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne 75003 Paris
Hours: tue -sat 11-19
Admission free

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