Galleries in Paris

Coming back from South Korea, Marie Lelouche sweeps Alberta Pane Gallery with a double exhibition, inspired from her stay in the Land of the Morning Calm, (Goyang Art Studio 2010 and Nanji art studio 2011). This young French artist, born in 1984 and graduated in 2008 from Ensba (Paris), is specialized in the sophisticated arts of blown glass and porcelain, which she combined to raw materials, such as fabric or wood, by questioning the material limits to derive unequaled shapes.
During her travels, Marie Lelouche plunges herself into cultural and social contexts very far from what she usually knows, in order to actively influence her artistic practice. Real exote – as Victor Segalen defined it – the artist experiences the different and the “other” to reach a full freedom in the observation of the object she will describe or just feel. The participating observance and the experience, as means of creation, are at the heart of her artistic practice.
For the first section of the exhibition, Marie Lelouche has decided to present a brand new series of objects in various techniques – drawings, sculptures and installations – developing the many features of the idea of Landscape .
Sans Tire (Still Life Landscape), is made of a wall drawing and a sculpture-installation inspired by Chuseok, the harvest celebration, one of the most important festivals in Korea. During this occasion, families carefully set out on a small table a pile of food for their forefathers. The title of the piece underlines the aesthetic impression of this view that, in fact, could remind a still life painting. On the Gallery walls pastel lines are horizontally drawn, a thin shade that evokes the typical celadon (pale green) in Korean landscapes and ceramics. Close-up and moved from the wall, a bookshelf hosts some totems in plumped porcelain shapes towering over wooden circles. The tops of the porcelain elements are painted in three shades of green: a color evocating both the Korean ceramic glazing and the image of a rotting fruit.
Sans titre (Landscape) is a set composed of a blown glass sculpture standing on a wooden support and a series of drawings (graphite on paper). The glass bust, shaped and doubled, lies on the inclined wooden board: this almost abstract view, echoes the onlooker. As for the drawings, they remind of the body through dresses, as the artist explained: “only a dress, as a piece of the social body, could take it back to an intelligible form.”
In the first section of the Korean Landscape exhibition, Marie Lelouche approaches the body’s themes, the subjects of object and landscape as an architect-anthropologist, dealing with a profound reflection on rituals, traditions and values of a completely different country: South Korea.