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11/4/2008

Bertrand Lavier

Yvon Lambert, Paris

Yvon Lambert, Paris is pleased to announce its third personal exhibition of Bertrand Lavier. Born in France in 1949, Bertrand Lavier has acquired a prominent place in the contemporary art world. Influenced by Duchamps and the Nouveaux Réalistes, his witty artworks disturb our routine ways of perceiving and conceiving art. They reassess our visual and intellectual education and impel the viewer to see how mundane objects can be transformed into authentic artworks. The artist reveals all the stages of this transitivity between life and art, he shows how an institution, a place of exhibition, a pedestal, the act of painting a surface are different factors in the same process. His painted objects, his repainted mirrors, and tableaux d’ameublements ("fitment paintings") instigate a reconsideration of the relationship between art and reality.

The exhibition proposed by the gallery attests new orientations in Bertrand Lavier’s "esthétique du détournement"1 . Ibo, 2008, questions the status of the original and the process of cultural exchanges. The benchmarks for this piece are traditional votive statuettes from Niger; they are objects of everyday use in Africa and became considered as artworks only through occidental art history. The artist made a series of 5 original statues of chrome bronze after the African model. He plays with codes specific to occidental sculpture by introducing an outside element into it. The seriality of this production, the change in material statuette into a work of art. There is some ambiguity in this newly acquired status though. The artist mingles identities and categories to give the viewer an unsettling yet pleasant experience.

Bertrand Lavier will also show at the gallery a wall of ceramic, a material he started working with at the Ceramic Biennal in Italy, 2003. Inspired by South African Ndebele wall painting, this piece reworks their abstract patterns, colours and figures. Originally intended to be painted on exterior walls of South African houses, the piece ended up in a contemporary art context. Again, it changes its own status along with the status of the exhibition space. Nothing remains uninfluenced by the artist grand detournement The last piece presented at the gallery, is a canvas on which two shades of Ferrari red have been applied. This piece recalls Rouge géranium par Duco et Ripolinî, 1974: both show two regular surfaces of paint in two very close shades. Here, the viewer is brought to realise there is variable shades of the mythical Ferrari red. The artist shows how symbols are subject to change, how their permanence is only a fantasy. The piece assesses in a witty way the instability of what seems to remain unchanged and the paradoxical ambiguity of what seems to be original. By placing next to each other two reds confounding both the eye and the word to express it, the artist demonstrates there is no perfect conformity between arts, reality and language.

1 : Jean Hubert Martin

vernissage april 12, 2008

Yvon Lambert
108 rue vieille du Temple - Paris
Free admission

stampa

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