Galleries in Paris

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
JOHN M. ARMLEDER – STEFFEN BUNTE – CLAIRE DECET – LUKE DOWD – SAMUEL FRANÇOIS – OLIVIER KOSTA-THÉFAINE – ANDREW LAUMANN – RENATO LEOTTA – KEEGAN MCHARGUE – JUSTIN MORIN – MORGAN-RICHARD MURPHEY – JED OCHMANEK.

For it’s new group show, the gallery Jeanrochdard is pleased to present works from the new artists joining us and thus marking the begining of new exchanges and dialogues. In addition to welcoming new artists, this group show is also the occasion to strengthen the ties with artists the gallery has been representing over the years.
Through its title, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the exhibition primarily evokes Steven Spielberg’s famous 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is also derived from ufologist J. Allen Hynek’s classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the third kind denotes human observations of « animate beings ». Here, the close encounter is the show itself. An event in which a person (the spectator) witnesses an unidentified object (the works of art). In direct association to Steven Spielberg’s UFO, John M. Armleder’s Furniture Sculpture with it’s colour fading stones, interacts with visitors, and the other works exhibited. Atmospheric, optical and contemplative encounters with images and objects, and the sense we make of them. Close Encounters explores the dialogues generated when the two (the viewer and the work of art) are brought together.
There, through prolonged encounters, the works can accrue meanings and perform functions, perhaps unimagined by the artists themselves, and often outside conventional art world discourse, participating in the rituals and rites of passage of people’s lives. These suburban artists, like Richard Dreyfuss character in the movie, use the objects of everyday life to make visible and tangible works at once ordinary and bizarre revealing and pushing inner and emotional perception forward.
Trying to find the purpose of what we encounter going through the show, we then feel undeniably drawn to an isolated area where something spectacular is about to happen. Understanding contemporary art today therefore increasingly asks for an approach that is sensitive to local and changeable meanings. Then can start the investigation pushing us to look behind and further … what is out there, will we be hypnotically plunged into the artists minds and reach a destination: an infinite peace through an individual and inner dialogue with an artist where it all becomes readable but without a specific script or object.
The whole constitutes an unpredictable tapestry of meaning-making, relationships and interrelationships to which visitors will inevitably contribute through the prisms of their own comprehension.