calendario eventi  :: 

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7/6/2006

Two exhibitions

La Maison Rouge, Paris

Bruit et fureur, the works of Henry Darger (1892-1973)

Bruit et fureur ("Sound and Fury"), the works of Henry Darger, is the first French monographic show devoted to this reclusive American artist who lived alone in a room on Webster Street in Chicago.
It wasn't until 1972, when he left his home for the hospital where he would later pass away, that his landlord Nathan Lerner, himself a photographer and a professor at Chicago's New Bauhaus, discovered the written works and paintings of his eccentric boarder.
This exhibition is an opportunity to discover the artist's early work, including five recently restored collages, which have never before been on view.

biography
Henry Joseph Darger was born in 1892 to a poor Chicago family. Shortly before his fourth birthday, his mother died while giving birth to a baby girl. His father placed the baby in an orphanage the same day. Until the age of 9, Henry lived alone with his father. At school, he was considered aggressive with his schoolmates and with a tendency towards pyromania. He was subsequently placed in a boys' home and later in an institution for feebly-minded children, where he received minimal education and was abused. At 17, and after several failed attempts, he managed to escape. He moved back to Chicago where, with his father now deceased, he lived alone. He found employment as a janitor in a Catholic hospital. Henry Darger was a solitary young man who, while working to earn his living, remained cut off in the imaginary world he had elaborated for himself, a means of compensating the lack of affection and poor education he had always known. For 50 years, Henry Darger shared his days between his job at the hospital and his neighbourhood church, attending up to four services a day. Throughout this time, he never breathed a word about his "other" life, the evenings and nights he entirely devoted to his life's work, "The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as The Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." The Realms of the Unreal This 15,000-page epic narrative, begun in 1911, recounts life in a kingdom ruled by a general who has seven pretty young daughters, the Vivian Girls. The kingdom falls under attack by surrounding countries, and the valiant Vivian Girls attempt to save the children who have been forced into slavery and violently massacred by enemy soldiers. The story ends with the little girls' victory and the return to an idyllic world, a veritable Garden of Eden. When writing this narrative, Henry Darger was largely inspired by the events of the First World War, by his readings about the American Civil War, but also his own fantasies. the collages and drawings Around the 1920s, Henry Darger decided to illustrate his writings. He began with collages, a technique he had experimented with a few years earlier with vast illustrations of battle scenes. He cut figures from newspapers and magazines which he glued onto increasingly large panels. Considering himself incapable of drawing, he created a method which could be called "proto-pop art". He searched children's books, advertisements, children's clothing catalogues and magazines for illustrations which he traced on carbon paper, then painted with watercolours. Using this technique, he painted ream upon ream of paper, on both sides, which he then glued together to form panels over two metres long. For decades, Henry Darger kept these paintings in his room, though he never dated them. "[...] While almost all his drawings were done from tracings, they have a value of their own, because they reflect part of Darger's world, which far exceeds that which one might usually expect from a tracing. One feels he really could have produced his own drawings had he not found his creative method, a sort of pictorial "adoption", so significant in itself." (John M. MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, Delano Greenridge Editions, 2002). The force, the violence, the very technique of this unique oeuvre sets it apart in the history of art. Discovered by an artist 35 years ago, it continues to influence the work of the new generations, including the Chapman brothers, Paul Chan, Marcel Dzama and Grayson Perry.

bibliography
J. M. MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, Delano Greenridge Editions, 2002. M. Bonesteel, Henry Darger: Art and Selected Writings, Rizzoli, New York, 2000. Klaus Biesenbach, Kiyoko Lerner, Henry Darger: Disasters of War, KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2000. B. D. Anderson & M. The'voz, Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2001.

catalogue
A catalogue published by Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York accompanies Bruit et fureur at la maison rouge. Text by Edward Madrid Gomez. In French and English, 80 pages, illustrated, €35.

related events
"In the Realms of the Unreal - The Mystery of Henry Darger", an 82-minute film about the life and work of Henry Darger, directed by Jessica Hu in 2003, will be screened in parallel to the exhibition. This exhibition could not have taken place without the kind contribution of Mrs Kiyoko Lerner, custodian of Henry Darger's estate, who opened her archives in Chicago and has allowed us to show its treasures. excerpts from The Realms of the Unreal

Storm
“At about twelve oclock noon the resistless flood increasing more rapidly tore away the huge forest of trees not so far off and this was the real beginning of the end [...] The enormous mass of trees were rapidly hurled down upon the doomed town or city, and the lines of every stream was rapidly obliterated and was nothing but a raging sea."

a world at War
“Millions of men on both sides howled at each other like demons, striking at each other, pouring a murderous fire at point black, cutting, stabbing, hacking, thrusting, and slashing like wild savages bent on wholesale butchery, while amid all this was an indescribable tumult of bayonets adding to the din [...]".

landscapes of the Realms
“They soon found themselves in a lovely place with beautiful flowers of all kinds about, and green unearthly grass of indescribable beauty, and trees more beautiful still, and the air was still and sweet. There was no sun, but there was such a bright heavenly light, that it could have blinded us, and many millions of unearthly colors.

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Michael Borremans, The good ingredients
recent paintings and drawings

La maison rouge presents the first showing in France of the work of Michael Borremans, a Belgian artist, born in 1963 and who lives and works in Ghent.
The viewer is instantly struck by the technical virtuosity of Michael Borremans' works, both his canvas oil paintings and his pencil drawings, watercolours and gouaches, which he sometimes creates on pages taken from old books.

References to the Flemish masters and, to an even greater extent, Manet immediately come to mind. However, the subject matter brings us closer to the present day, or at least to the mid-20th century, with references to illustration, 1940s cinema, and most of all Belgian Surrealism.
Indeed, there is something disquieting in Michael Borremans' works. The narrative themes are often dream- related or drawn from the imagination, and the characters hold enigmatic poses as they perform difficult-to- decipher tasks. Meticulous factory workers or small groups of middle-class figures appear just beyond the grasp of a reality that is only suggested by a detail.

Many of his drawings use elements of scale and mise en abime. The figures seem to be living inside an architect's model or a theatre decor, observed by some external entity. Texts often accompany the drawings, transforming them into draft sketches or blueprints.

The artist's scathing sense of humour, the intriguingly strange titles and the technical mastery of the works themselves all give Michael Borremans a singular status in the contemporary art world. At la maison rouge, Michael Borremans shows eight recent paintings in which the patterns of light and shadow, the earthy brown, grey and ochre tones and the subdued brushstrokes all play an essential role. The composition is austere, uncluttered and tightly framed, drawing all the more attention to the absurdity of the human condition in what is, here, a uniquely masculine environment.

Another room shows ten drawings entitled "The House of Opportunity", a series which Borremans commenced in 2002 and has regularly added to since then. The house in question is a parallelepiped with a three-sided roof and hundreds of red shutters covering its walls.

The house appears again in each of the small pencil drawings and watercolours, seemingly as models, projects or monuments in environments as diverse as the open countryside and a museum room, always throwing back to the Flemish masters

This critical view of modern architecture, the repression of the "happiness for all" which society promised us, is evident in all these works.

Paradoxically, Borremans also presents an object, a white and red cube that is also an allusion to contemporary art and to sculpture, and which he makes the subject of his work, an "opportunity" for himself.
In "The Hostages", his latest drawings which make up "The Good Ingredients" series, Borremans tackles a burning issue with ferocity and derision.
He paints bodies that have lost their identity, bodies at the mercy of those who are threatening them with guns. These bodies, which are used as objects to be arranged into patterns, inevitably recall the images of Abou Ghraib prison in Iraq, but also countless other moments in history.

Image: Michael Borremans Portrait (detail), courtesy: David Zwirner, NY

la maison rouge
Fondation Antoine de Galbert
10 bd de la Bastille - 75012 Paris
metro Quai de la rape ou Bastille
6,50 euros tarif plein
4,50 euros tarif redui

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