Galleries in Paris

M A R T I N E T  &  T E X E R E A U   

French artist tandem Martinet & Texereau, author of four-handed drawings, goes against the traditional vision of art as the expression of the artist’s personality: Here one plus one equals three, for the end goal is not to add up two individual styles but to create a third one.  The focus of the work is daily life, which our jaded gaze takes in so little, if at all, and in particular the daily life of housing and its shared areas. In their most recent drawings  Martinet & Texereau  make an inventory of the volumes and nooks of buildings with their entry halls, tiling, skirting boards, and closed doors, where time appears to have stopped. Even the plants in their automatic sprinkling pots and well-groomed exterior small gardens seem to exude lifelessness despite the growing vegetation. All is clean and contained. The pencil strokes act like a scalpel feeling tissue, learning its surface before breaking into it… Each detail (joints, veins, textures) is rendered with a fascinating combination of surgical detachment and sensuality. The framing is tight and the focus perfect, like that of a microscope examining a specimen. The universe conveyed by Martinet & Texereau is evocative of New Objectivity, without the biting humor. There seems to be a touch of surrealism in these works; humanity may be invisible but it is not absent.

E S B E N   K L E M A N N
I do things that seem impossible at first…because it’s ALWAYS interesting! My accumulated experience throws ideas into the void and challenges me to give them material life. Thus speaks Esben Klemann, a Danish multi-artist who approaches all media with a playful attitude, constantly attempting to subjugate all materials, following the rule of “systematic uncertainty”.

The exhibition will show works that evolve around imaginary architectures in metamorphosis: the video Sketch 2016, an ensemble of drawings in pen and in stoneware, one of his favored mediums. Esben Klemann’s work functions according to a logic of ideas and form associations: Lines and structures undulate, come up, come down, wind, densify, slide and throw themselves in the void, erasing themselves in order to go back immediately. All is potentially in mutation in a movement where the unpredictable becomes an important element. His interventions and sculptures in concrete space graft themselves, parasite-like, and inspire themselves of what is given to take it elsewhere… In that manner, Esben Klemann is really from his time, where the desire to master and pursue an idea have given way to the quest of the unknown, even a form of bowing down to the forces that escape us. Observation then allows to better seize them until they escape again…

Esben Klemann’s constructions are contemporary, poetic and amusing follies, snapshots of an omnipotent freedom.

S H O I

Since the creation of her drawing series “être” (being) (2011), a small armless legless voluptuous but headless woman has appeared in the universe of Shoi, a Korean performer and artist. These scenes drawn in pencil which are Dionysian, crude, funny and tender reveal an intimate world rendered with a mix of naturalist precision and simple contouring. The human being is closely linked to nature to the extent of finding its prolongation in hybrid anthropomorphisms and woman-animal or woman-vegetal-mineral accumulations. Corals, sea anemone, jelly fish, fish or turtles inhabit this submarine world where the armless and legless woman takes light steps, moves by turtle back or becomes an integral part of these “tiered pieces” that recall both the universes of Bernard Palissy and Hieronymus Bosch. Contrary to the legless and armless woman who has no head, the animals do have theirs. .. As a sexual voluptuous being, the headless and legless woman breathes, gives herself or bows to nature and gets carried away in the currents and growths that form her shelter. Her absorption can be so total that only the tip of a breast is visible…. In one drawing a big solitary gleaming jellyfish slithers gracefully in the semi-obscurity – probably the image of a libertarian and liberating journey… Sub-marine here meaning sub-conscious.

Panorama of a personal mythology, whichever the medium, Shoi’s works allow to live again, exorcize and surpass, go beyond one’s past a past or a difficulty – in the spirit of a shamanic ritual.