Despite having studied cinema, animation and video, Paul Gondry always comes back to graphic arts. A question that haunts every film-maker’s painting is: what is the need for leaving the moving image to one side, at least temporarily, for paint? Why prefer painting—the art of the fixed image, made of poor material and which has hardly changed over centuries—to the art of modernity that is film, with the continuity of its twenty-four images per second, sound, light and movement? Not that cinema surpasses painting, but when you make, as Paul Gondry does, clips, short films or video games such as role-playing games, what more can painting offer?

The answer is in the medium’s very nature, its artificiality being the best means of translating the visions the artist seeks to display. Painting is a must when suggestion takes precedence over narration, apparitions over incarnations, fantasy over reality. Paul Gondry’s painting is not merely about set images. Rich in details, textures and lights, it installs an atmosphere and retains a specific, haunted moment. It precipitates, focuses and emblematises. More than a picture, it is about seeking the “image’s feeling,” says the painter.

The artist likes to describe his painting as a receptacle, a tomb, a manuscript. It is the opposite of film, its residual shimmering, what survives once the screen and the light have been turned off. His painting plunges all the deeper into darkness and formlessness, from which springs the unknown, even the monstrous. His drawings search through the depths of the human psyche, examining its fantasies, illusions and dreams. It brings out images shaped by the universal unconscious, on the edge of fantasy and nightmare. Shadows, silhouettes and profiles cross the frame, as if returning from the depths and margins: they portray ghosts, elderly children, hieratic magicians or celebrants of a nocturnal ritual. This dark, almost sticky, universe is reminiscent of some of F. W. Murnau’s visions or scenes from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. This world is also very Lynchian in its atmospheres and intrigues, flirting with Eraserhead(1977) or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).

All painting, at least when informed, also incessantly crosses the infinite territories of art history and the works of the past. In Paul Gondry’s painting, such dialogues can be perceived, changing from one canvas to the next: we recognise the Nabis is some of the colour arrangements, Edvard Munch in the distorted figures, and the Surrealist painters in the chimerical visions encased in a symbolic system. Watching films by Paul Gondry, connections can also be made with the contemporary artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.

His pictorial practice, which he started aged twelve, extending to comics and graphic novels, developed like an obvious path, a natural inclination. Today, this fully embraced painterly practice follows a set process: it often begins with flat areas of colour on a linen canvas in order to master the texture, then it gradually lets the drawing emerge through numerous layers of paint. Some series are based on a collage of various photographic material, reworked beyond recognition. Painting, carried out in the domestic space, surrounded by personal objects, is a solitary activity that fosters an intimate relationship with the medium: time stands still, it is “mummified,” and a personal feeling is extracted out of it.

Metamorphosis is a crucial motif in this painting: the transformation of bodies and nature, transmutation of matter, slow fading towards death. The colours contribute to this feeling. To quote Edward James about Leonora Carrington, it is as if they “have materialised in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.” At the bottom of his alchemical crucible, Paul Gondry constructs his palette with bold, acidic montages, at the risk of dissonance: cooked and re-cooked reds, the colour of dried blood, sooty blacks, but also the somewhat supernatural light blues and greens of the aurora borealis. Colour does not describe the object; it projects the symbolic qualities and contributes to the internal balance of the composition. By so doing, Paul Gondry leans towards Symbolism, but of an esoteric kind. The picture is deciphered like a secret grimoire. Midnight suns and Van Gogh-styled starry nights make up the sky in Paul Gondry’s scenes, which are impossible to place— day interior? night exterior? The whole thing is theatrically set up, lit up by artificial lights.

Unlike cinema, where images follow each other, painting can combine several pictures in one, becoming a fixed panorama where characters and new stories coexist, like many threads towards possible narratives. Some of Paul Gondry’s compositions are reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s kaleidoscopic paintings, which must be explored slowly to be understood.

In some places, a wealth of details evoke the Orientalists’ ornamental trend, as in Gustave Moreau’s works: wrought-iron gates and other minutely worked, but never common, motifs. Paul Gondry transports his subjects into fictional spaces out of time. The pictures are inhabited by masked creatures, either naked or dressed with large togas. An elongated presence in the water inevitably brings to mind the iconography of Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites. The pictorial treatment varies depending on the area: passages with myriad details are juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds, which provide projection surfaces for the viewer. Figures emerge from this substance as if on the screen of a silent film, undergoing transformations, in states of limbo.

The name of the artist-run space Paul Gondry has co-founded in New York, 15 Orient, reveals his taste for esotericism, which he shares with the Surrealists and Leonora Carrington. Some titles—such as Nigredo, an alchemical term referring to the phase of putrefaction, calcination and decomposition, the first step towards the philosopher’s stone—leave room for doubt as to his possible initiation. The artworks themselves also maintain ambiguity and resist any unequivocal interpretation. They have tipped over into the occult, where secrecy is the order of the day and words are superfluous.

Laetitia Chauvin

Since the mid 2000s, Helene Appel paints, as faithfully as possible, with consummate skill, all manner of subjects—big and small, beautiful and ugly, organic and inorganic. She imparts a real presence to the life-sized subjects she paints on raw linen canvas. The formats and techniques she uses for each painting are dictated by the subjects themselves.
Embracing even the most trivial details, her works put forward a vision stripped to its essentials and far removed from any moral or metaphysical interpretation. The unvarnished truth of everyday objects is captured with unrelenting realism, preserving the perfection of the moment. There is no attempt to manipulate the eye in a trompe-l’oeil manner, instead our gaze is encouraged to seek out the inherent aesthetic qualities of envelopes, car headlights, a sewer grate, soapy water, … The apparent simplicity of bringing to life these objects through painting, opens the door to the most profound exploration of the relationship between art and reality. Or to put it more simply: “What you see is what you get… but take a better look at what you see.” To arrive at this point: don’t be satisfied with merely representing reality, create it.

Helene Appel is a graduate of the Hamburg School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Based in Berlin, her work has been exhibited at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, at the Drawing Room and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, at the Städtische Galerie in Delmenhorst and at the Thalie Foundation in Brussels. Her paintings feature in numerous public and private collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece, La Gaia in Italy, the Olbricht Collection in Germany and at Touchstones, Rochdale in the UK. She is represented by the galleries The Approach in London, P420 in Bologna and Rüdiger Schottle in Munich.

Paperclips, ropes, envelopes, notepads, whistles, keys, locks and mirrors are some of the things in our world that Anne Neukamp has attempted to represent in her paintings. For her, the representational activity is not driven by an aim for realism. Instead, her purpose is purely semiologic: this is about creating the symbol of a paperclip, a whistle, a lock or a mirror, that is, an image the representational ability of which is reduced to the bare minimum.

In the exhibition “Mirror,” the artist presents about ten new paintings that show, over unstable backgrounds made with tempera and oil, pictograms of various kinds of mirrors: some are set up on a stand (Announcement; Tilt; Sprout), other are double pieces (Duplopia; Revision; Together), while others are broken (Incident; Fall; View). The mirror, whether the real object or its image, has been a topic of interest for many artists in different ways. With Magritte, many mirrors (The False Mirror, 1928; Not to be Reproduced, 1937) do not reflect the world as they should, as if the specular item did not work. As for Gerhard Richter’s Spiegel (1981 onwards), mirrors purchased to be converted into substitutes for paintings, bear witness to a desire to be present in the immediate world, to an art that is keen not to ignore the space it takes any longer. Since 1962, with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Quadri specchianti, which blend painted images with reflections, the mirror has been presented as a potential ersatz painting. When looking at Anne Neukamp’s pictures, one thinks nevertheless more of other mirrors, namely those in Roy Lichtenstein’s series Mirrors (1969-72), which early on, and not without humour, had set Pop abstraction’s semiotic regime—the representation of an abstraction. Although Anne Neukamp’s paintings are clear descendants of Lichtenstein’s mirrors, their digital origin gives them a genuine specificity.

In the mid-1970s, the Pictures Generation artists re-used existing images in an appropriative approach. In a similar way, which could be called “Pictures 2.0”, Anne Neukamp selects on the internet—from websites such as Clipart or 3D Models, which provide ready-made drawings with simplified lines and digital symbols—generic shapes that later become the subjects of her paintings. For this new series, she has chosen pictograms of mirrors with basic shapes, sometimes even somewhat pixelated—images that might have been created by the graphic designer Susan Kare, the creator of the first Apple icons in the early 1980s. The A4 prints of these generic representations of mirrors cover a whole wall of Anne Neukamp’s studio in Berlin, while on the contiguous walls, these pictograms are enlarged and recreated on a noble linen canvas. Announcement testifies to this change of scale: the small pictogram pinned to the wall becomes the main subject of a composition measuring 2.8 metres in height and 1.6 metres in width. Similarly, the pieces of the broken mirror in Fallappear disproportionate due to the painting’s large format (2.2 m). Besides its imposing size, each mirror features formal characteristics that are just as unsettling, due to their digital origin. The extremely stylised frames around the mirrors of Property or View, adopting a pixelated shape, seem to come from the Super Mario Bros video game’s decors. As for the Siamese mirrors in Together, Revision, Adjustment and Sprout, they remind us of the specular object in some of Walt Disney’s tales. In the face of this painting and digital tool trade, we cannot help but think of some creations from the 1980s that typify the post-modern era, such as Gerwald Rockenschaub’s pictogrammatic canvases or Suzanne Treister’s paintings of video games, which display this moment when the digital image becomes the very subject of paintings.

Anne Neukamp’s mirrors make no reference to reality. The artist uses them because these objects produce images and, what’s more, representations directly and immediately created by reality. But in these paintings, the mirrors only reflect precisely that which cannot be represented: abstraction. The mirrors in Announcement and Tilt, outlined in black like a picture frame, show purely geometric abstractions, created by diagonal, parallel white and blue stripes. The same stripes, of various blues, cover the surfaces of “mirror-paintings” in Adjustment and Revision, while the shimmering surfaces of Sprout and Incident are represented by blue gradients. If we go by the semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce’s symbol classification, the sign presented by a mirror, the reflection, is a clue, if not a mega-clue since it directly shows reality. Yet here, it seems to have lost this clue-like dimension since it shows nothing from reality, neither body nor object, but abstract shapes. The mirror, too, is affected by this loss of reality, since it is nothing but a mere pictogram. It is as if Anne Neukamp’s paintings were a celebration of the icon’s revenge on the clue, or at least pointed it out.

Among the earliest epitaphs carved into the gravestones in France’s oldest pet cemetery, in Asnières in the Paris suburbs, we can find inscriptions that repeat well-known declarations such as: “The more I learn about people, the more I love my dog,” or “Disappointed by the world, never by my dog.” Darwin believed that the intense love humans feel for their pets was reciprocal, imagining that monkeys smile at us because they are happy; unfortunately, today’s research shows that this superficial smile simply testifies to the individual’s submission to a creature better placed in the pecking order. Although it is currently impossible to scientifically evaluate love and attachment, studies in 2015 measured blood-serum levels of oxytocin, the hormone related to affection and trust secreted by humans and their faithful companions: in a dog cuddled by its human, oxytocin levels can increase by more than 50 %. With cats, this increase is limited to around 12 %.

The bond of love between humans and animals is not built on very solid foundations: according to Professor Jean-Claude Nouët, Honorary President of the French League for Animal Rights, 50 % of rapists committed acts of cruelty against animals in their childhood and 15 % of them also raped animals. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Kant and Schopenhauer, there is a general link between cruelty to animals and violent acts committed against humans; moreover, recent sociological studies indicate that the majority of serial killers as well as simple murderers, “learned their trade” by killing or torturing animals when they were young.

For Sigmund Freud, the motive for this is sexual, so it’s hardly surprising that Steve Gianakos was attracted by the subject. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud postulates that the urge to commit acts of cruelty and the sexual urge are linked in early childhood by anastomosis, an interconnection that is biological. This association of sexuality and cruelty—exercised from an early age and against animals of all shapes and sizes—is quickly curbed and ideally even controlled by the emergence of feelings of pity; the ability to empathize with the pain felt by others, including animals, which inhibits the universal desire to dominate and that appears relatively late in a child’s development.

Artistically, empathy takes on an unconventional form in Gianakos’ work. In a now legendary interview with Susan Morgan in 1979, published in the second issue of the magazine Real Life¹, whose cover featured a drawing from the How to Murder Your Pet series, the artist states: “My work is not nearly as offensive as the people who look at it. Just walking the streets, you see things which are much more disgusting than anything I could ever conceive of doing—people vomiting all over the place. I try to sweeten things up, I don’t try to vulgarize them. I try to take things I know exist and make them prettier, rather than trying to make pretty things more ugly. When you talk about rich ladies fucking their dogs, that’s an example of something it would be impossible to vulgarize because it’s already too vulgar. So, the only way to prettify it is to make a nice picture of a rich lady fucking her dog. At least that would appeal to some people.” In 1945, in Bruno Munari’s book for children Animals For Sale, an animal salesman desperate to find the ideal companion for an invisible child, finally discovers that rather than an armadillo, a pink flamingo or a porcupine, what the child really wants is a roast chicken with fries!

In the above-mentioned interview, Gianakos gives free reign to his caustic and iconoclastic humor when addressing the question of subjects of art. For example, he mockingly asks: “How many artists have already painted flowers and are going to paint flowers for the next hundred years? What’s with them and flowers? Why don’t they paint germs? How many artists have painted paramecium? Only Arp. Didn’t Arp paint paramecium? I think that was very perceptive of him.” Pushing his theory still further, he states: “I’m very fond of snots, but I’ve never sold a snot painting. I don’t think even Picasso could sell a snot picture, I really don’t.”

Produced in 1978, the 24 drawings that make up the series How to Murder Your Pet are perfect examples of Gianakos’ art. Firstly, as we have already seen, the subject matter is deeply linked to the primal emergence of sexuality. Secondly, the serial treatment of the subject is typical of his working practice. As he explains to Susan Morgan: “Obviously the best way to murder something is to tie a rock around its neck and throw it off a bridge, but since I’m so arty and these are all very visual, I make my idea a pretty picture.” In this series, Gianakos does not depict dead domestic animals, but rather ways of killing them, a variety of forms of torture that are all variations on the childish cruelty described by Freud. While some of them have obvious sexual connotations (the goat, stuck in a doorway with a sweeping-brush in its rectum, which at the time outraged a number of commentators), others depict the brutal—and certainly painful—encounter between an orifice and a foreign body: the guide dog with a walking stick protruding from its eye socket, the bowling ball forcing open the hippo’s mouth, the cow sucking on the exhaust pipe of a beetle (the car), the leg of a modernist chair being force-fed to a duck… There’s also symmetry in the corkscrew tail of a pig penetrating an electrical wall socket, leading to its electrocution.

Laureate of the 4th edition of Emerige discovery price in 2018, price in collaboration with the galerie, the artist will have his first parisian monographic show in the space 2 rue Beaubourg. The exhibition will be the occasion to present his most recent work, and more precisely his last two series in which he continues his specific exploration of what Alain Berland qualifies of an « open door in the imaginary ».

Simultaneously, the new edition of the Emerige discovery price will take place. Twelve selected artists will be exposing in a new location situades at Voltaire, Paris 11th arrondissement.

In parallel to the exhibition, the galerie is delighted to announce the coming out of its second book from the collection started in 2017 and dedicated to the artistic practice of young artists  COMMERCE. The book eponyme of the exhibition will offer, as well as a rich iconography focused on the artist’s recent work, a generous interview between the artist and the curator Marianne Derrien. Alain Berland et Gaël Charbau, both long time connoisseur of the artist’s work, have naturally contributed to this book, as well as the american curator Campbell-Bétancourt.

Temporaldaten

Opening: June 17, 2017

The gallery Jérôme Poggi is pleased to dedicate a first solo exhibition to Marion Verboom (born in 1983 in Nantes, France), whose she is now representing in collaboration with The Pill Gallery in Istanbul (Turkey).

Animed by the concept of «Temporal-daten» by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Marion Verboom has designed a series of new sculptures from her «Achronies» series, a project initiated at her recent exhibition at the Abbey of Sainte-Croix aux Sables d‘Olonne (FR). Resulting from the research carried out at the several residences a the new plaster or resin sculptures opens a stratigraphic dialogue between the different civilizations around the Mediterranean, generating their own temporality through hybrid totems. Next to this composite work, Marion Verboom will show a set of sculptural and graphic works specially produced for this exhibition.

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Opening: April 29, 2017

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Jérôme Poggi is pleased to present Kees Visser’s third solo show in Paris. On this occasion the artist will gather a set of hitherto unseen works, elaborated from new materials. His works are in several international private and public collections (Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, National Gallery of Iceland, Living Art Museum in Reykjavik, MoMA in NewYork, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou, FRAC Bretagne, FNAC, etc.).