GUIET – FOURNIER
The Jean Fournier Gallery is pleased to present the recent works of Nicolas Guiet in hisexposition titled cjskx. The title of the works and expositions of Nicolas Guiet are an important part of his work. The artist asks someone who is connected to the event to tap blindly on a keyboard. The result is unpronounceable and the typed words are unpredictable, and here they benefit from being nonsense. The title doesn’t give any indication of comprehension; it consists only of a name. The sense is in the nonsense, a road in a direction that has no end.
From the entrance of the gallery there is a physical confrontation that operates with the works on Nicolas Guiet. On our right, a monumental painting welcomes us. The shape is similar to that of a television screen whose bottom melts on the ground. Its copy but of a smaller size and different colors is placed to look at it. Their exaggerated round lines recall those of well-known furniture of past decades. On the left side facing the window, another monumental work is similar to a cube from which 3/4 of it’s volume has been pulled out, confronts us. We think of a half-eaten bar of chocolate or a science fiction geological void. These distinct cutouts and choice of colors therefore create a dynamic.
These three works of art engulf us and put us in the world on Nicolas Guiet. In a movement just as dynamic but more like that of a shooting pain, a blue line like bubble gum being stretched out, runs along the length of the main wall ending by attaching itself to the back wall. « Something unappealing, it has the nature of « spit » about which speaks Georges Bataille, it gives off a smooth and attractive appearance, in circumscription well drawn, well marked… »1
Our eye travels along this wall to discover under the glass roof, a set of alluring works in mixed colors and shapes. Through our wandering we discover shapes close to the gear of a watchmaker that appear shortened or to be swallowed by the wall on which they rest. Their colors are vivid and sometimes are paired with a mouse grey. The lines and bends appear to squirm to better diffuse, install and place themselves in the space, in an angle, on the wall. Other forms are more like vegetables, following the example of a green cylinder, a type of tree trunk with sawed branches and from which the end of the growths is a bright pink.
Half-vegetable, half-aquatic or science fiction animal, the tentacles on the end of which are suction cups that seem to be watching, observing us. Attached to the angle of a pillar is a wavy work makes us think of a huge marshmallow or of a snake whose movement is fixed.
Finally installed magnificently in the center under the glass roof is a distorted polygon punctuated with suction cups that face us. It seems that it too, for an unknown reason, spills, and drips on the wall and floor on which it is placed. Nicolas Guiet with his paintings, developed in 3D, proposes a new vocabulary, a new language of shapes that stretch and develop in the space which welcome them, through a poetry with a rhythm, a punctuation, and reprises. Publication of an exhibition catalogue with a text of Eric Suchère, Lienart Edition and Jean Fournier Gallery.1 Marion Daniel, in Nicolas Guiet. Imprononçable, L’H du Siège, Valenciennes, 2012