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BELTRAME - KOPELMAN - JOUSSE

BELTRAME – KOPELMAN – JOUSSE

Galerie Jousse Entreprise, 6 rue Saint Claude, 75003 Paris, Tel : 01 53 82 10 18
January 11 - February 22, 2014

Louidgi Beltrame and Irene Kopelman are concerned here by so-called natural sites which they experience as much in the reality of their representations as in the representation of their reality, by means of specific recording tools and procedures. A camera for one, traps for the others. So here are the tools which produce a film -The Walking Tree- and a set of drawings -Leaf Litter Trap-, two works, therefore, which is tantamount to saying two conceptual spaces, between which is inserted a text by Santiago Garcia Navarro.

Santiago Garcia Navarro (born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, lives in Rio de Janeiro) is a writer, researcher and critic. Since 2008 it has developed a test-fiction entitles Winters at a Beach Town. He teaches at the Torcuato Di Tella University Art and Architecture Schools in Buenos Aires.

Irene Kopelman, Leaf LItter Trap, 2012
31 designs, pencil on paper, 24 x 24 cm

Leaf Litter Trap is a set of 31 drawings which Irene Kopleman produced during a research stint in two stations run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution (STRI) -a scientific laboratory based in Panama, within which work, in particular, biologists studying the tropical forest and wetlands. Irene Kopleman decided first of all to follow the scientists and study their working methods in the field, and, as she walked in the forest, she discovered mysterious objects-small tubular PVC constructions. These objects turn out to be used for collecting plants falling from trees-sorts of leaf traps which the artist then uses to approach, record and represent the site based on an experimental protocol.

« August 13. I decided upon the location quite arbitrarily – I simply chose a place where there were many trees, guessing that many things would fall from them. The day after I found very small things in my net. I collected them and drew them but was a bit disappointed with my catch. I didn’t know what kind of conditions would produce good amounts of litter, so I kept going. The following days proceeded in the same manner and with similarly small amounts of leaf litter. By the fourth day, I decided to install two more traps on different locations, hoping that other material would fall into their nets.
August 17. I installed two more traps, one under a Cecropia tree (the leaves of which I very badly wanted to draw) and another one under a tree whose leaves were partially eaten by caterpillars, thus creating the most intriguing patterns. The following nine days were spent drawing the material that had fallen in the nets of these three traps. » I.K

Louidgi Beltrame, Jadu Ghar (House of Magic) n°1, 2014
Black and white photography, silver print on baryta paper mounted on aluminum and wood, 60 x 40 cm

This image after a series of four photographs was taken in the geology section of the Indian Museum in Calcutta before it closed in 2013 for renovation. This institution is the first Indian museum founded in 1814 by the « Asiatic Society of Bengal ». Its first curator, Dr. Nathaniel Wallich, was a time Super-Intendant of the botanical garden in Calcutta on behalf of the East India Company.

Louidgi Beltrame, The Walking Tree, 2014
Film Super 16 mm transfered on video HD, 35 mn

Louidgi Beltrame films in 16 mm a large banyan tree in the botanical gardens in Calcutta. This tree, whose distinctive feature is the way it spreads rhizome-like over several hundred yards, is approached like a forest of clones, a metaphysical space where histories re-surface: the history of the invention and parallel development of photography and telegraphy in the context of colonized India, Linnaeus’ dream according to Foucault, reminiscences of the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, where reality and fiction met.

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