Hubert Duprat

GALERIE ART: CONCEPT
13 rue des Arquebusiers
January 14–March 10

Hubert Duprat, Polystyrène et galuchat (Polystyrene and Sharkskin) (detail), 2011–12, polystyrene, wood, tanned sharkskin, dimensions variable.

With his limited output and its equally rarefied exhibition history, Hubert Duprat has received critical acclaim over the years as a sequestered alchemist of sculpture. He is known above all for incorporating a wide range of unusual materials, which he often examines in depth, exploring everything from their physical properties and vulnerabilities to their status in the history of material culture. Unlike other artists who share a similar perspective (Simon Starling, to name just one), Duprat chooses closed, “classical” forms that concede little or nothing to the narrative dimension.

His current show presents untitled sculptures: a cylinder made of pyrite cubes; plastic dice with pieces of Ulexite; a Plexiglas cube composed of smaller cubes. A final work consists of polystyrene and tanned sharkskin (Polistyrène et galuchat, 2011–12). This piece, perhaps the most beautiful of the lot, is a good example of the sophisticated logic Duprat uses to choose his materials. Similar in terms of surface grain, sharkskin and polystyrene are also related in the function they serve––the former providing thermal insulation for the fish, the latter for humans. In every other way, however (origin, composition, workmanship, cost), they are utterly different. Their association summarizes an impressive evolutionary time span of the history of life on our planet, from the natural to the artificial, from biological to technological evolution.

The other three works on view here are different in terms of inspiration but similar in their basic principle, and they bear out Duprat’s inclination to create objects worthy of a contemporary Wunderkammer, wherein intellectual knowledge emerges from the sense of astonishment elicited by something rare, unusual, or unexpected.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

James Castle

GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE | PARIS
5 rue Debelleyme
January 14–March 17

James Castle, untitled, no date, found paper, soot, 8 1/2 x 11”.

James Castle’s works were collected by a small circle of admirers during his lifetime, but in recent years he has attracted unprecedented attention from both museums and the art market. After retrospectives at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2009) and Madrid’s Reina Sofía (2011), the Galerie Karsten Greve, in collaboration with the James Castle Collection and Archive, is currently presenting the artist’s first retrospective exhibition in France, with a selection of ninety-one works.

Born deaf, Castle spent his entire life on an isolated family farm in Idaho. He never learned how to speak, use sign language, read, or write. On first glance, his art might seem a strong example of naive art, folk art, or even art brut, as defined by Jean Dubuffet to describe the production of individuals on the margins of official (social or artistic) culture. Indeed, the way Castle worked is reminiscent of the methods used by artists associated with those movements. He created colors by blending his own saliva with stove soot, and his painting tools consisted of simple sharpened wooden sticks and soft rolled pieces of cardboard. Though skillfully rendered, the works evoke the spontaneity and primitiveness of children’s drawings. However, as Robert Storr has pointed out, the originality of Castle’s work––its frank descriptiveness, simplicity, diversity of form, and, in a broader sense, its formal and iconographic “classicism”––casts doubt on whether Castle should be placed in those categories that deeply inspired the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. Sometimes figurative and sometimes abstract, his images never portray imaginary worlds, as pieces by outsider artists so often do. On the contrary, Castle’s art is born out of his fascination with his immediate environment; the vision his works present is structured, calm, and perhaps quasi-photographic.

Translated from French by Jane Brodie.

— Julie Jones

Yan Tomaszewski

PRIMO PIANO
4 rue Gabriel Laumain
February 15–March 24

View of “Embellishments,” 2012.

As the “Greater Paris” project of urban development beyond the Périphérique (ring road) climbs higher on the city government’s political agenda, the cultural sector is enjoying exponentially improved access to exhibitions and events in various locations. For instance, the Tram contemporary art network, an association of art spaces around the region, facilitates transport for special visits or openings.

One contentious site on boundary between outer and inner Paris is at the heart of a work in Yan Tomaszewski’s current solo show. Proposal for a Museum on a Desert Island, 2009, is a nearly twelve-minute video showing the artist acting as a mountain climber, architect, and worker, while clandestinely entering a construction site on Seguin Island. Located in the Seine on the western outskirts of Paris, the island once housed the famous Renault factory, and many grand proposals for recycling its existing structures or constructing new architectural developments have been declined in the years since the factory ceased production. The camera homes in on Tomaszewski marching up and down vast areas of variegated land (or, rather, piles of rubble) in what seems to be a long expedition leading to a flat area where he stops to mark out a potential floor plan in blue chalk lines.

Also on view is a series of drawings on photocopied photographs of contemporary Paris, titled Embellishments (francigenum opus), 2010, which extrapolate on an unrealized gothic urban plan (to unify the city in the style of Notre Dame cathedral, the epitome of thirteenth-century Paris architecture) proposed by Victor Fournel as a counter to Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century transformations. The latter’s predominance is further referenced here as his portrait Der Baron über dem Nebelmeer (The Baron Above the Sea of Fog), 2012, restages him facing front in Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 canvas Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog). Finally, still questioning the attainment of new heights, Tomaszewski diverts the form of Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags, printing on the squares of fabric professional announcements for rocailleurs, a French word for artificial rock workers or craftsmen, who contributed to Haussmann’s park decorations. What is it that we’re praying for?

— Caroline Hancock

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

COLLÈGE DES BERNARDINS
20 rue de Poissy
February 10–April 15

View of “videodrones,” 2012.

A musician and composer by training, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is known for multisensory installations that plumb visual material for its sonic potential and vice versa. In his “videodrones” series, begun in 2000, Boursier-Mougenot transforms the comings and goings of passersby into a hypnotic musical composition.

The latest incarnation takes place at the Collège des Bernardins—a former Cistercian monastery that, since its 2008 renovation, has produced an active cultural program with an emphasis on contemporary art. For this exhibition, Boursier-Mougenot installed five security cameras outside the building and projected the video through a live feed onto the arched walls of the sacristy. The outside world is transposed onto the dark meditative space; public life is offered up as spectacle. At the same time, a special apparatus detects movement in the video and translates it into a continuous yet ever-changing stream of sound suggestive of Yves Klein’s 1949 Monotone Symphony and La Monte Young’s minimalist music of the 1960s.

While the “videodrones” have been exhibited in several different spaces, the fourteenth-century sacristy seems particularly well suited, evoking the tradition of prepolyphonic vocal singing. Boursier-Mougenot exploits the college’s architecture, as pedestrians seem to disappear through a niche in the gothic stone wall as they walk down the curb, only to reappear on another wall.

If the installation is a nod to medieval ritual and sacred space, however, it is also a commentary on twenty-first-century issues around privacy and surveillance. Despite the occasional head-on glance that makes you think for a moment that a subject is aware of the cameras, the pedestrians outside are oblivious. “What was I doing when I walked by,” I wondered, “and how many other security cameras are tracking me at any given moment?”

— Alexandra Perloff-Giles

Jimmy Robert

JEU DE PAUME
1 place de la Concorde
February 12–April 29

Jimmy Robert, Untitled, 2010, ink-jet print and wooden box, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2".

For the first Satellite Program exhibition curated by Filipa Oliveira, Jimmy Robert has produced reflections on his personal and artistic education. Langue matérielle (Material Language), 2011, is the title of both the show and an installation that links a small space halfway down the stairs and the basement gallery: A long roll of archival paper is draped over the balustrade and held down by MDF covered in beech, ink-jet prints, and dribbles of pink epoxy paint. Langue means “tongue” in French; langue matérielle is a pun on langue maternelle, or “mother tongue.” As a Guadeloupean brought up partly in France, Robert’s relationship to the French language is inevitably complex. His use of materials suggests a highly aestheticized and distanced dose of defiance. The visible Pantone labels—“F230 Rose dragée” (Sugared-Almond Pink), “F264 Tête de nègre” (Negro’s Head), “F270 Tulipe noire” (Black Tulip)—poetically suggest confrontations with forms of discrimination.

The other works on view are short filmed performances. In Paramètres, 2011, Robert sits at a table facing a pile of A4 cards with geometric drawings and cutout patterns, and picks each one up after the next, from left to right and vice versa. During this process, one of the litanies he repeats in French is: “Set up the parameters, adjust the structure.” The didactic presentation points at all the authoritative codes, rules, and systems that format our lives. Downstairs the only sound is the frenzied noise of rustling paper in the video Untitled (Folding 2), 2011, where forced, albeit playful, construction is once again on the agenda. The camera focuses on the artist’s hands folding and manipulating a photograph into various forms. In Vocabulary, 2011, Robert dances to tunes on his iPod, dressed in plain jeans and a T-shirt similar to what Bruce Nauman wore in his 1960s action videos. Robert repeats nine different routines, each for a length of time during which a defining word appears over the image that humorously refers back to art-world rigors and conventions: from MODERNIST to CONFORMIST via WHATEVER!

— Caroline Hancock

“Néon: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”

LA MAISON ROUGE
10, Boulevard de la Bastille
February 17–May 20

Jeff Koons, Pot, The Pre-New series, 1979, plastic tubes, inbox pan, fluorescent lights, 27 7/16" x 10 5/8" x 8 7/8".

One hundred years after French engineer Georges Claude invented neon tube lighting and half a century after Dan Flavin began creating his fluorescent sculptures, a new exhibition pays homage to the history of neon as an artistic medium. “Néon: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”—which takes its subtitle from Maurizio Nannucci’s 1970 work of the same name—presents an impressive range of 108 works by eighty-three artists. Considering the fragility of the material and the difficulty it poses in terms of both transportation and installation, curator David Rosenberg deserves credit for the exhibition’s ambitious scope.

The curatorial premise—assembling works based on medium alone—may seem too easy at first. Yet the exercise pays off: We’re left with a new appreciation for the versatility of neon, alternately comic and lyric, sensational and spiritual, dangerous and tantalizing. First introduced into the plastic arts in the 1940s and ’50s by Gyula Kosice and Lucio Fontana, neon was further explored in the ’60s by Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth in the United States, Arte Povera pioneers Mario Merz and Pier Paolo Calzolari in Italy, and Martial Raysse in France. While primarily used for drawing or writing in light, neon is revealed here as equally adaptable to sculpture (Pierre Malphettes’s La Fumée blanche [White Smoke], 2010), installation (Jason Rhoades’s untitled explosion of suspended orange wires and neon lettering from 2004), and immersive environments (Carlos Cruz-Diez’s psychedelic room Chromosaturation, 1965–2011).

Of course, neon belonged to commerce before art, and the greatest danger of this surfeit of the material is that it comes across as kitsch. Yet if Claude Lévêque’s Rêvez! (Dream!), 2008, or Alain Séchas’s portrait Maryline, 2003, test the limits, works like Stefan Brüggemann’s This Work Should Be Turned Off When I Die, 2010, take neon in a different direction entirely, suggesting the melancholic potential of a medium that can, at any moment, go dark.

— Alexandra Perloff-Giles

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

Mathieu Mercier

CENTRE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN D'IVRY (LE CRÉDAC)
25-29 rue Raspail
January 20–March 25

Mathieu Mercier, Untitled (pair of axolotls), 2012, display case, neon lighting, soil, aquarium, water, two axolotls, 86 x 70 x 129”.

Mathieu Mercier’s current exhibition, “Sublimations,” marks a noticeable break from the DIY spirit of his earlier projects and examines the shifting status of the object within artistic and commercial fields. An installation in one room of this show evokes an impersonal showroom display with Duchampian humor. Objects sourced from supermarkets (bananas, plates, a candle, and binoculars, to name a few) are individually placed on Corian pedestals. Each is paired with a pictogram or depiction of a measuring tool––perfectly printed on the support through a process known as sublimation. Some have been slightly distorted by the artist to reinforce the interplay between visual and semantic associations.

The layout of the exhibition, which creates a dialogue between each work and the architecture of the Crédac, enhances the show as a whole. In another gallery, for instance, Mercier connects the museum’s exterior view to an artificial cityscape: The room is illuminated by a streetlamp inspired by the creations of Italian designer Gino Sarfatti, and a bicycle leans against a post reminiscent of a traffic light. Nearby is a bench composed of two enormous PVC pipes.

A final mise en abyme operates in a third room, where visitors are plunged into almost total darkness. Here, the viewer observes a pair of axolotls swimming in an aquarium placed in the middle of an oversize display case. While echoing the scenography of an old natural history museum, this installation finally makes us question the relevance of our frameworks of knowledge and representation.

Translated from French by Jane Brodie.

— 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

“Du Monde clos à l’univers infini” (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe)

LE QUARTIER, CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN DE QUIMPER
10 esplanade François Mitterrand
January 28–March 25

View of “Du Monde clos à l’univers infini” (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe), Le Quartier.

When the expanded-cinema movement of the 1960s and ’70s brought moving images out of the closed confines of the movie theater into the open spaces of the art gallery, it not only undermined cinematographic conventions but also questioned these images’ power and significance. Fifty years on, this exhibition brings together pioneering works from that era and pieces by contemporary artists with similar concerns: abstraction, mixed-media presentation, multiple screens, and the deconstruction of the projection event. Many echoes are to be found here, but rather than a nostalgic return to the past, the newer pieces offer fresh perspectives on the lingering issues the older works raised.

Take Bruce Conner’s Crossroads, 1976. Weaving together found footage of a nuclear testing program carried out on Bikini Atoll in 1946, this hypnotic slow-motion film features shots of a majestically unfolding mushroom cloud, thereby underscoring the dangerous allure of nuclear power. Depicting the motifs produced by different types of missiles propelled through liquid, Raphaël Hefti’s starkly beautiful series of photographs “A Portrait of a Bullet,” 2010, likewise uses abstract patterns to explore the relations between death and the sublime. Paul Sharits’s Frozen Film Frame, ca. 1971-76, a rectangular assemblage of colored celluloid strips evoking an abstract painting, communes with Rosa Barba’s Enigmatic Whistler, 2009, in which a piece of film wound by a motor wraps itself around a projector: Both works negate the projection event, drawing attention to celluloid’s material as opposed to imaginal aspects, while divesting it of its original function. Meanwhile, Vesna Pavlović’s Search for Landscapes, 2011, employs the technique of multiscreen projection: Here, overlapping and endlessly repeating vacation slides, showing historic monuments and exotic tourist sites, jostle for the viewer’s attention, underlining the commercialization of cultural history and the manipulative power of images in shaping human aspirations and desires. Transcending expanded cinema’s ’60s countercultural associations, the recent works in this show give it a no less subversive edge.

— Rahma Khazam

“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