This exhibition gives artists who exhibited in previous years the opportunity for a second encounter.
Vogel APACHETA: “What becomes diluted and dissolves in Vogel Apacheta’s work is form. The pictorial sources can be discerned in the vegetation and landscapes of his native country and elsewhere. They resurface as fragments seemingly fractured and deconstructed by a device resembling a kaleidoscope, with mirror-reflection effects, dividing lines, folds, false symmetries, collages and superimpositions… Here, we are in a space of complete freedom, where the question of figuration or non-figuration does not arise. The resulting paintings thus resonate with another statement by Malraux, who wrote: ‘The conflict between figurative and non-figurative artists matters only because of what was at stake: the painter’s freedom (Pollock begins with Olympia…), even if that means the freedom to find new forms of figuration. It will not be surrendered anytime soon.’ Excerpt from a text by Louis Doucet, art critic, 2024 Jonathan BABLON: The evolution of living organisms and societies are areas that Jonathan Bablon explored during his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts de Tours, which he completed in 2012. Since then, he has pursued a practice spanning drawing, sculpture and installation. In 2013, following a residency in Kona, Inde, his first engagement with natural materials led him toward an ecological reflection that he explored more deliberately during a residency at Mode d’Emplois in 2014. After several exhibitions at art centers in France, he continued his artistic research through residencies (at Usine Utopik in 2022 and the With Artist Foundation in Corée du Sud in 2023). Theoretical readings on the relationship between human culture and nature have informed the artist’s practice as he seeks, through the visual arts, a way to respond to contemporary and environmental issues. Aline DECROUEZ: Developed through a progressive, experimental approach, her practice focuses primarily on questions relating to color and the interaction between color and space, with each spatial arrangement allowing me to play with different viewpoints through new chromatic and formal configurations. Whether assembled into three-dimensional paintings or arranged separately in space to form a surface, the monochromes she creates seek to question the ways in which people relate to their environment, turning perception back upon itself. Viewers find themselves both facing and immersed in the expressiveness of color. Perception becomes experience. Viewers are prompted to act and move so that a viewpoint may emerge: an overall perspective then takes shape, a “landscape”… The monochrome creates a need for fragmentation and a form of organization. An imaginary realm emerges wherever tensions arise. These tensions, which maintain a form of balance—internal tension and the interplay of tension among the different monochromes—form a whole. Painting as a way of listening to the visible. Rémy DUBIBE: Remy Dubibé is a nomad by upbringing, born in the Emirates on the edge of the desert and raised in Indonésie beside the water and the jungle. All the memories of this exotic childhood lie at the heart of his work: accumulations of small shapes molded in clusters, suspended forms or taut nets, whose whiteness and obsessive delicacy are nevertheless deceptive, concealing a primitive harshness and a propensity for chaos. Capsules, shells, water lilies and origami folds; smooth, sanitized, prickly or elliptical forms that, like ghosts or floating remnants of a decaying world, recover a “subtle wildness” through swarming, accretion, proliferation or fragmentation… Marie Aimée FATTOUCHE By conjugating infinity in the infinitive, Marie Aimée Fattouche invites us on an intimate journey through the mechanical research she began almost two years ago. Within this sanctified space, deliberately inspired by the hypostyle halls of the Egypte of her origins, these strange columns and structures—rising upward or lying on the ground, when not truncated and threatened with ruin—seem to bear witness to a mysterious transcendence. They all follow the same principle, elevated into a system: two pieces of clay, a key and a double latch, each shaped by hand and mechanically fitted together, their assembly weaving a mesh that is both strong and flexible, yet never free from risk. The very essence of the creative endeavor lies in this paradoxical duality experienced intimately by the artist, in the endlessly repeated act of assembly, and in the vertigo of the void around which the work is organized and from which it draws its coherence. A wager, a promise, a prayer. Pascale Richard Sarah KRESPIN In her woven sculptures, her apparently soft Mutations, Sarah Krespin echoes the uncertainties and fears of our time. Neither fixed nor free, but seemingly caught in convulsive spasms, they draw on all three realms: mineral, plant and animal. Her training at the École Duperré left her with an affinity for fabric, supple yet stiffened by a copper-wire framework that fixes its shape and transforms it into the memorial monument of a unique, unrepeatable gesture—one that, even if she tried to repeat it, would never produce the same results. […] Antoine LANGENIEUX His painting practice is based on two fundamental ideas: the surface as a place to be constructed and the technical process from which form emerges. Through various assembly and folding methods, he reflects on gesture and how it is anchored in the canvas. He seeks strategies that minimize the role of the hand, allowing him to create a painting without preconceived ideas. Activity in the studio wavers between coloring, deconstruction and repair. It is an autonomous recycling process. In the Abrasée series, the paintings are worked on the floor, freed from their stretchers, before being folded and immersed in baths of color, then dried and finally unfolded. He replaces the brush with sandpaper. In a gesture akin to that of a sculptor, he removes and subtracts material from both sides of the canvas, blindly creating a network of lines. By abrading the surface, he delves into its depth and volume, ultimately revealing the movement of earlier gestures. Over the course of this lengthy process, the material gradually changes and deteriorates, creating the need for repair. Hélène NERAUD Tell Hélène Néraud that she is an outstanding ceramicist. She will immediately become angry and reply that she is not a ceramicist—a term she considers reductive and overly technical—but a painter. She should therefore be regarded as a painter who has succeeded in freeing painting from its stretcher, its plane and its surface, allowing it to unfold in space. She states this clearly: “My painting seeks to free itself from the stretcher, but never from space or surface. It mutates and moves; its supports have been renewed. My pictorial practice gives form to painting as an envelope that always remains open. It is variable and constantly rewrites itself. Not everything is formed; nothing is fixed. What becomes of these arrangements when they unfold? The surface becomes the support. The paintings always have a relationship with being propped up. They constantly establish a relationship with the wall; they never stand upright on their own. Today, my painting exists primarily in relation to volume. It is transposed into ceramics.” Aurélie SCOUARNEC “From one series to the next—quests for the margins and the invisible as much as intimate epics—Aurélie Scouarnec unfolds timeless, sensory worlds that enchant and deeply immerse us. Worlds that trace outlines rather than build a center, that suggest more than they state, and that give pride of place to mystery and the pagan. Fragmentary worlds at the limits of representation, oscillating between a deep grounding in the materiality of natural elements and a form of the ineffable, the sacred.” (Eric Bouttier, 2023) Ines SPANIER Ines Spanier is interested in the graphic exploration of material structures, which she takes to the scale of microscopic close-ups. The temporal dimension plays a decisive role, both in the time required to create the drawings and in the choice of motifs. She favors motifs in states of alteration or dissolution, materials visibly marked by aging. In an early drawing from 2009, she depicts a single body segment as an expanding skin landscape evocative of a vortex. The cosmic and organic dimension that characterizes her later works is already germinating in this first piece. Ines Spanier does not practice a stereotypical form of hyperrealism; she develops her work through an open-ended process of awareness and self-exploration. In her drawing practice, this exploration of interiority takes the form of an obsession with the potentially infinite penetration of surface structures, down to an unfathomable nanometric scale. This quest for depth gives Ines Spanier’s drawings their unmistakable sense of translucence and fantasy. Here, photographic reality shifts toward a form of abstraction in which conventional visual reference points almost completely disappear. Ines Spanier is an artist distinguished not only by the astonishing depth and breadth of her thinking, but also by the singularity and density of her work. The radicalism and consistency with which she records lived time—as though conducting an experiment on herself—to materialize and condense it, without ever yielding to one-dimensional conceptual rhetoric, are unparalleled in contemporary art. Prof. Alexander Roob
Source: paris.fr — photo: @GHP