Raymond Gervais

ROSASCAPE
3 Square Maubeuge
April 11–May 25

Gervais, Raymond, Finir (To End), 2012, twenty-four lecterns, dimensions variable.

Placed on a lectern in the central room of Rosacape is a paper sheet that reads: TO WALK FROM THE GRAVE OF SAMUEL BECKETT (1906–1989), IN THE MONTPARNASSE CEMETRY, TO THE GRAVE OF CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862–1918), IN THE PASSY CEMETRY. Singly present in Raymond Gervais’s previous work (see Elementa Musicae [Elementary Music], 1987, or Dans le Cylindre [In the Cylinder], 1994), the writer and the composer are here united through an imagined relationship, based on actual common bonds: Beckett occasionally played Debussy’s compositions, both lived and are buried in Paris, and both faced a deep artistic concern for finitude.

Beyond the existential question tacitly asked by the two installations on view here—how do we end?—Gervais wonders about the materiality of concepts, imagination, and music. In Finir (To End), 2012, several lecterns are placed circularly in the entrance room; on each are sheets of paper inscribed with the title of Beckett’s last poem, Comment dire? (What Is the Word?), 1988, and sentences from one of his last texts, Soubresauts (Stirrings Still), 1989. The installation continues in another room, where other lecterns present the names of instruments Debussy planned to use in three sonatas at the end of his life. Arranged like an orchestra, the lecterns seem anthropomorphic, ghostly even, waiting for music scores never composed. On the wall of another room is Achille Barclay, 2012, an installation made of twenty-seven framed paper sheets on which combine a title of a work by Beckett and Debussy. The piece creates the feeling of a physical encounter between two bouncing minds while suggesting the possibility of a third voice—or, in Gervais’s words, “something that could have been but will never be . . . for it is over for them, it becomes possible for me.”

— Julie Jones

“Les Possédé(e)s”

TRIANGLE FRANCE
41 rue Jobin, 3rd Floor , La Tour Friche Belle de Mai
May 3–June 2

View of “Les Possédé(e)s,” 2012.

The conceit of this motley group show is pretty elusive: to present works that may or may not transmit their authors’ intentions, of which said authors, incidentally, may or may not themselves be aware (hence the title: “The Possessed”). While this could potentially designate a particularly coy genus of neo-Conceptualism, in which, say, yet another receipt necessitates an elaborate explanation in order to be fathomed as a work of art, it does not. Rather, the curator of this show, Dorothée Dupuis, is interested in the irrational underpinnings of the art on display and the high ratio of interpretability that such underpinnings might yield. Given that the irrational is generally persona non grata in the hyperanalytical, concept-heavy French context, any embrace thereof is liable to seem novel, even radical, and therefore refreshing—even if their terms are not exactly radical, as in Jocelyn Villemont’s The Troublemakers, 2011. More of a metareflection on interpretability than an irruption of the irrational, this video installation depicts two adolescent skateboarders as they philosophically speculate with risible precocity on the nature and significance of a primitive-looking baseball bat. In contrast, the logic behind the inclusion of certain works, such as Tim Braden’s relatively straightforward, bright and washed-out figurative paintings, remains, at least for this writer, obscure, while the surrealistic wood and rope sculptures of Sophie Bueno-Boutellier, who is known to traffic in the mystical, seem a bit more at home in gray area sketched out here. Cécile Dauchez’s winsomely delicate photocopy prints, whose colorful surfaces have been manipulated into lyrically abstract unintelligibility, feel more willful in their rejection of intention. All that said, if the exhibition seems to occasionally and wistfully overdetermine the alleged ambiguity of its content, it nevertheless makes a compelling argument for what could be inelegantly characterized as the WTF factor—of which indeed, a certain baseline amount, even at the risk of incoherence, is indispensable to any artmaking enterprise.

— Chris Sharp

“L’Institute des archives sauvages”

VILLA ARSON
20 avenue Stephen Liégeard
February 17–May 28

View of “L’Institut des archives sauvages,” 2012.

The challenge taken on by the five curators of “L’Institute des archives sauvages” (Institute of Savage Archives)—Jean-Michel Baconnier, Christophe Kihm, Florence Ostende, Marie Sacconi, and Eric Mangion—was a difficult one: to create a large exhibition based on the idea of the archive, a theme that has been, along with the “atlas” and the “collection,” one of the most investigated, discussed, and exploited by artists and curators alike in recent years. Aware of the difficulty, the francophone team took three years to select some thirty artists to participate and to develop the criteria for their selection. Wisely limiting the field of investigation, the curators took into consideration not the plethora of artists who delve into already established archives, but instead those who create their own archives and come up with systems and tools for organizing the world. They did not place limitations on the material form that the archive can assume, and indeed, some extremely bizarre manifestations are included here, from Christoph Fink’s ceramic disks to Dan Peterman’s recycled plastic tiles; from Tatiana Trouvé’s “waiting modules” to the shelving Franz Erhard Walther constructed to contain and organize his fabric sculptures of 1963–69.

The curators have not always followed their own rules, but the exceptions (and there aren’t many—Ian Simms, Christoph Keller) don’t detract much from the coherence of their endeavor; if anything, they contribute to its richness. Beyond the show’s admittedly interesting theoretical premises, its power lies in the selection of artists and works, a list that intelligently combines illustrious names—Mike Kelley and Matt Mullican, for example—with “niche” and emerging artists, as well as outsiders. Notable “discoveries” for this writer include Patrick Everaert, Anna Oppermann, Alain Rivière, and Patrick van Caeckenbergh. But it is likely that even the most sharp-eyed viewers will find artists they don’t know, whose “savage” criteria for classifying reality—idiosyncratic, unstable, extraneous to the standards of science—will fascinate them.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore

— Simone Menegoi

“Déplacer Déplier Découvrir: La Peinture en actes, 1960/1999”

LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE (LAM)
1 Allée du Musée
March 3–May 27

View of “Déplacer Déplier Découvrir: La Peinture en actes, 1960/1999” (Displace, Disclose, Discover: Acts of Painting 1960/1999), 2012.

Curated by Marc Donnadieu, this scholarly exhibition presents specific bodies of work by five historically disparate painters—Simon Hantaï, Martin Barré, Marc Devade, Jean Degottex, and Michel Parmentier—who were nonetheless linked between 1960 and 1999 by the Parisian gallery Jean Fournier and a shared preoccupation with materiality. The series on view here were selected by virtue of the evolutions they represented in each artist’s practice, registering a shift toward a more objective, nonexpressive, and methodical form of painting. Transitions include, for example, Barré’s jump from squeezing paint directly from a tube of oil paint onto canvas to using matte black spray paint and thereby eliminating any trace of space generated by impasto, and Parmentier’s return to painting after a fifteen-year hiatus, by picking up directly where he left off but shifting colors, media, and techniques (horizontal black bands of paint on canvas gave way to light pastels applied by hand on tracing paper in same-sized bands).

While the pleasure of seeing so many of Barré’s abbreviated gestures in aerosol together is somewhat undercut by the relatively cramped hanging, a similar although more contemplative gratification arises in the encyclopedic presentation of thirty-two of Hantaï’s “Panse” (Bandage) works from 1964. Testifying to his break with a more expressive, Surrealist-inflected mode of painting, these canvases, which resemble mottled, Dubuffet-esque cocoons on wrinkled, cream-colored grounds, are halfway between his famous pliage (folding) technique and traditional painting. If the inconsistency of their quality makes for a more studious than purely pleasurable viewing experience, the beauty of Devade’s “H” series, 1975–77, in which the supports/surfaces theorist departs from a more hard-edged mode of variegated abstraction to something more somber and uncontrolled, is stunning. Despite the bewitching veils of ink applied in thin, spatially rich washes, any attempt to project into the painting is arrested by the underlying pictorial motif of an H and the fact that the work is made on two horizontally stacked stretchers, thus dividing and intractably reasserting its physical reality.

— Chris Sharp