Galleries in Paris

The intention behind Tentatives de Positionnement is to encourage a dialogue between the work of four artists. Anne-Charlotte Finel’s video connects with Eva Nielsen’s paintings to reveal almost supernatural landscapes, focusing on geographical and chronological interstices. Elsewhere, the psychological portraits of our urban society made by Tim Eitel meet Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s paintings, weaving links between intimacy and politics. The dialogue embarked upon between these two twosomes questions how territory is seen. The artists o er us their vision of the world and their stances. The works become meta-territories causing us to re-think and re-invent the world.

In Hors-sol, Anne-Charlotte Finel films an impressive greenhouse by night. The visual pollution caused by the LED and sodium lights permitting the intensive cultivation of tomatoes tinges the surroundings with pink and yellow. The aurora borealis thus formed — a mark of human activity — disorients and disturbs the animals’ cycle. The visual and acoustic atmosphere of the work creates an ambivalent feeling in the viewer, hovering between fascination and anxiety in front of this luminous spectacle worthy of a sci-fi film. A similar ambivalence emanates from Eva Nielsen’s paintings which tend to challenge our visual and mental perception. In her new series titled Gradient, she further reveals her creative process. Using the random manipulation of fragments of her visual research, she constructs her painting in successive layers. Silkscreened angular forms cleave the landscapes which form backgrounds, thus upsetting the calmness of her desert expanses and creating non-places — worlds which do not seem to belong to any space/time-frame.

Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s stance is akin to that of the documentary maker. Her paintings illustrate a twofold geographical horizon: Israel and France — together with everything that geography engenders, and at times capsizes, in terms of a sense of belonging. The series Tentatives de Positionnement casts an anthropological eye on the deserts of the Negev and Judea, revealing the human and aesthetic complexities and contradictions that they contain. By transcribing her study objects with her particular sensibility, Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s artistic approach di ers from Tim Eitel’s, who uses painting to create analogies with reality, constructing fictitious parallel worlds based on situations which have been seen and experienced. In eliminating the details of reality, Tim Eitel’s paintings show an almost abstract simplicity which steeps his world in a serene and contemplative atmosphere. His works are a far-reaching quest for the perception of space, light, and time, testing painting’s potential for representing these elements.