inscription
CARAMBOLAGES - GP&N VALLOIS

CARAMBOLAGES – GP&N VALLOIS

36, rue de Seine, 75006 Paris ; tel : +33 (0)1 46 34 61 07
23 April - 23 May 2015
www.galerie-vallois.com/

Happy 90s birthday Mr Arnold Odermatt! Galerie GP & N Vallois is dedicating this fun exhibition to the Swiss brigadier who came to fame thanks to Harald Szeeman at the 2001 Venice Biennial. On this occasion, a novel selection from his famous series « Accidents » is unveiled. In Odermatt’s photographs, the violence of the vehicles’ collision seems literally appeased by the tranquillity found in the snowy landscapes, whereas the shock is very much tangible in the 1974 totemic compression of an Alfa Romeo Giulietta by César, or the films of the Aérofiat 2.1 road trials, an improbable prototype created by Alain Bublex in 1995. With Richard Jackson, the pile-up is the source of an explosive pictorial action: on January 22nd 2012, the Californian artist orchestrated the crash of a scale model Cessna, filled with fresh paint, against a 6-metre large canvas bearing the quot « Accidents in Abstract Painting ». A large colour photograph as well as a video testify in the exhibition of the force of this «accidental painting».
The effects and traces of violence are manifest in the Colère de télévision by Arman, rare surviving work from an ensemble of televisions on which the artist had expressed his anger at the opening of the 1976 Fiac.
Impact is at the heart of Jimmie Durham’s video Collected Stones, a series of 13 clips in which stones are thrown on objects, furniture, or finally sink a ship at the bottom of a bathtube. Traces of shocks even become scars on a Marbre Rose slab, painted by the artist.
In Peter Fischli & David Weiss’s video Der Lauf Der Dinge, theatre is at play, plentiful with chain reactions and other equilibrium exercises, where the artists play with fire, air, water, gravity and even a variety of corrosive liquids, thus determining chain series unwinding the course of things and objects. While, from his part, Paul Kos plays with fire in a perilous balance exercise between a broomstick and a candle, other equilibrist’s games – funnily recalling the Equilibrium series by Fischli & Weiss – are being drawn out of the paper cut-outs by Mexican artist Jose Dávila, as well as by his stone and glass sculpture Joint Effort in which an extraordinary tension defies all understanding.

Fortunately, pile-up in art does not cause any damage, on the contrary, it fosters abundance and juxtaposition games of forms and times. Born out of the collision between a contemporary work and the abstract forms of camouflage pattern, Alain Jacquet’s painting Camouflage Hot Dog Lichtenstein (1963-1998) mixes an art history master work in both Pop and Nouveau Realist spirit. This work, nearly 6 meters wide, is a resumption of the work that concludes in apotheos the camouflages period of the artist, a painting cut into 300 pieces during a performance in 1963 at Galerie Breteau. In the same way, Jean Tinguely, with his Meta Kandinsky (1990), goes back to the historical «Méta-Reliefs», moving paintings from the 1960s, by setting into motion with small motors, little coloured and damaged elements certainly found in rubbish tips. Julien Berthier’s Malaxeurs Cinétiques, sculptures made of zinc-plated steel, re-enact the forms of abstract and kinetic art. These paint mixers, unexpected extensions of a drill, become real tools of artistic construction.
Keith Tyson’s Scrape Paintings, a series initiated in 2013, consists in re-working with paint already existing works: the superposition of topics and techniques from different periods engenders mysterious works in which patterns start interweaving. These interferences build complex surfaces formed by different images forming a connection and sometimes clashing. No trace of a shock in Pierre Seinturier’s pastel, but rather a worrying strangeness in this sacrificial scene in the middle of the woods where a drama is about to unfold. Finally, there must be at the end of this pile-up journey a possibility for repairs. Brazilian artist André Komatsu, makes the poetic proposition of «taping back» framed broken glass slabs with adhesive tape, which, like plasters, creates a new damaged landscape.

Powered by WordPress