Galleries in Paris » 75006

VILLEGLE – VALLOIS

Galleries — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 14:51:06 +0000

Over the last two years, my mentality has changed regarding the choice and framing of the posters I collect. Previously, I insisted on subverting a commercial or political aspect. The slogan, the brand name of the product became illegible, the celebrity or the politician’s smile disfigured. When I snatched posters from painting exhibitions, even if I held the exhibited painter in high esteem, despite the distorting irony provided by
the tears, I had the feeling of being confined to my own milieu as a visual artist. Conversely, this new thematic series about itinerant music groups, rappers and rockers, does away with any and all insecurity. The redundancy of their names, so sparsely hatched and legible most of the time, provides a clarity of information that doesn’t bother me at all. I hope to create a bridge between two spheres which, although related, have little interaction and hardly ever mingle. In the same way, I hope to encourage their different audiences to immerse themselves in an art form that may have been indifferent to them. The exhibition « Jacques Villeglé, STAR », the first organized by the gallery since the artist’s death in 2022 and the 13th since the beginning of our collaboration in 1999, was conceived as a tribute to his insatiable curiosity, exploring his relationship with the world of entertainment (cinema, dance, theater and music) from the 1950s to the end of his career.

BUBLEX – VALLOIS

Galleries — Fri, 31 May 2024 16:24:23 +0000

In keeping with his practice as a photographer, Alain Bublex has produced a series entitled “105 x 135” consisting of accidental photographs – representations of a landscape with an uneven horizon or completely pink images, the only color that has survived the malfunction of his camera’s shutter – images that are at once “funny and tragic” in the artist’s own words. Around it, drawn frames anchor the work of art in an imaginary world of its own, accentuating its resemblance to a painting with which the viewer is familiar. For, as Alain Bublex points out, we appreciate a landscape in relation to a place we know and this comparison between the two is the primary condition of our gaze. His inspiration comes from anthropologist Philippe Descola, who explains that a landscape is only created through our experience of a represented landscape. Questioning this gaze, Alain Bublex has drawn on the trompe-l’œil process, inviting us to leaf through magazines he has created from mock-ups of existing free magazines: the high-speed train magazine, M Le magazine du Monde and the Hermès magazine. The artist slipped his photographs into them, appropriating the magazine page numbers and replacing texts with blocks of colour to give a better idea of the structure of such an object.

For Alain Bublex, it is essential to reveal the production process, including that of his own work, to offer « possibilities for future gazes » as he himself puts it. Hence the incompleteness of certain forms in the paintings in his oeuvre. It is not about creating a misleading image, easily generated by artificial intelligence today. Instead it is about offering a vision to the viewer.

This vision also emanates from his video Paysage 20 minutes, a stroll along an American motorway not far from New York, where the view of a magnificent sunset gradually comes into focus, the sky blazing in shades of orange and pink, questioning the poetry of everyday life in a prosaic setting. What is more, the film was shot in the home of the American painter Frederic Edwin Church, famous for his glowing sunsets, in a nod to Alain Bublex’s video.

WINSHLUSS – VALLOIS

Galleries — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:11:36 +0000

For his fifth solo show at the gallery, Winshluss (Vincent Paronnaud) confronts us with a burning reality.
Something is burning – the exhibition’s title – sets the tone: yellow, pink, red, everything indeed is on fire!
I told you so, he sneers… Through a new series of large-scale drawings, Winshluss asks a question present in his work as a cartoonist, a
visual artist or a filmmaker: what space is left for the individual in society? No answer to that query, other than the artist’s grating laughter: sometimes when I get up in the morning, I’m irritated by what I hear and see. Iʼm flabbergasted, I’m desperate and then, I laugh…
What else can I do? It’s all so absurd!
At the center of the gallery, it’s atomic war… An attack perpetrated against Barbapapa. Winshluss’ work is linked to childhood imagery, even in times of war. Children have always played war, nothing new here. In this world adrift, Barbapapa, who was born in 1970
(the same year as Winshluss) in a garden, like a flower, lacks his former glory. He seems to have undergone « a few mutations », and is now Barbapapatonic – a fluorescent monster with tentacles, the target of everyone’s gaze: a horde of armed men, tanks, and helicopters rushes
towards him. This installation, shown for the first time at the gallery, was specially created by Winshluss in 2013 for his major exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs – Un monde merveilleux (A Marvelous World).
This skull cackles in our faces, free and impertinent: it’s got the good life, a colorful life, between flaming butterflies and red-eyed roses with dilated pupils, in eternal complacency.
Ultimately, the skull seems far more into Peace & Love than Barbapapa, who finds himself trapped in the stench of a heap of garbage in another work on paper, or than White Man – Winshluss’s alter-ego -, trapped in an hourglass, caught short by time and life. In yet another
work, a smiley face with kissing lips lights up a neon-pink sky like a shooting star. It blazes towards a gray, rocky earth where a few daisies still remain; as do two beings, a man and a woman. They stand back-to-back, smiling at their smartphones. Networks are humanity in all its disgusting splendor, says the artist in a 2021 interview in Les Cahiers de la BD.
Ecology, social networks, nuclear power, war, pandemics, Winshluss combines them all,
analyzing the mess that is mankind.
Something is burning…. You can laugh or cry. Winshluss offers us the chance to do both at the
same time!
Agate Bortoluss

DE ANDREA – VALLOIS

Galleries — Sat, 20 May 2023 09:54:48 +0000

Let us be honest: we have all been caught out once before, the first time we came across a hyper-realistic sculpture in an exhibition. Even a regular visitor to galleries and museums of contemporary art may have felt this mental jolt when he or she spotted a tourist in a brightly coloured shirt by Duane Hanson or a completely naked young woman by John DeAndrea from a distance; the truthfulness of these figures, their incongruity, tore apart the peaceful atmosphere of the exhibition space. Thus, in 1972, visitors to Documenta were shocked by Arden Anderson and Nora Murphy (1972), looking at them as two lovers lying embraced, caught just after, or just before, love. Of course, todayʼs art lovers are no longer shocked, but they nonetheless continue to feel a hint of embarrassment. Doesnʼt the warm presence of the model impose itself on their imagination like a perspiration from her bronze effigy?
The artist, who it must be said is as much a painter as a sculptor, has devoted hours and hours of work to the hallucinatory precision of the skin tone, its transparency, the touch of the most delicate vein, the most minute beauty spot, pimple or blemish.
Grace
A few centimetres away from a life-size naked body, whose skin texture is so perceptible that you think you can see it shiver, you keep your hands in your pockets. In that moment, deep inside us, we feel the return of
what Klossowski calls the « high-schooler point of view ». I would add this circumstantial remark: I am certain that the amateur feels this nudity more keenly than a « militant » of todayʼs fashionable neo-puritanism who would come to denounce some indecency or exploitation of the female body, his gaze obeying not so much his sensitivity as his ideology.
[Almost all the sculptures in this exhibition – all from 2022 – show women in very unexpressive positions. They are pensive, at rest. Adam and Eve themselves look more resigned than affected by being cast out of Paradise. It seems that these sculptures bring into the place of inhibition all the restraint, the concentration, the libidinal indifference that prevails in an academic studio, precisely where DeAndrea says she discovered her true calling.
Catherine Millet, John DeAndrea’s Les belles indifférentes (extracts), published in Grace, a monograph on John DeAndrea

UNGERER – VALLOIS

Galleries — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 13:29:46 +0000

To medieval practitioners, alchemy is the ultimate Science, condensing the virtues of all others. Its subject is life. Tomi Ungerer too has studied life; that of women, men, animals, all the way to the lives of shoes, water taps, coffee pots and other daily artefacts.
Young Tomi failed his high school diploma, but he did receive an honorable mention: he was hailed as a student with a “perverse and subversive imagination.”
These adjectives, stemming from the latin words perversus, subversum, mean ‘to overthrow’. And that is precisely the essence of metamorphosis: the total transformation of a being, a thing. “One observes people and then they meld together.”
Ungerer looks to natural sciences, anatomy, and to the principles of metamorphosis itself. The human body becomes a favorite theme bestialized, mechanized, repaired… Tomi the Alchemist does not strive to bringlife and perfection to impure objects; on the contrary, his Magnum Opus aims for the more mysterious transformations, the strangest beings. Over the years,
Tomi built a collection of oddities of all kinds, which he ingeniously uses in his sculptures. No philosopher’s stone for him, but a piece of rock observing us disdainfully behind a pair of sunglasses, a sly grin emerging from a simple crack in the stone…

From ‘metamorphosis’ we slide into ‘fantasy’, melding myths, legends, the wondrous and the fantastic; all things to do with imagination.
Thus, animals become human, men and women become beasts: sprawled on an armchair, a crocodile watches TV, still wearing his business suit; a scantily clad woman, wearing stockings and high heels, turns into a swan whose long neck mischievously slides between her legs, lifting her skirt some more.
Nothing is safe from Tomi’s eye and mind. “The cogs of Strasburg cathedral’s astronomical clock modeled my brain, fashioning the basis of my
elucubrations”; and women turn into mosques or cathedrals, columns and palm trees become garterbelts, rose windows become bustiers, and a judiciously placed door (naturally) invites us into the ‘house of god’… Even metaphors are transformed.
Tomi goes from anthropomorphism to trans- humanization with an unscrupulous and confusing ease, and peers into interstitial, forbidden realms; the result is a “baffling instability of classifications” (Roland Barthes).
Similar to an ever-changing cloud, Tomi’s Magnum Opus never repeats itself, guided always by doubt (“why not?”, he says) which opens the mind’s doors. But above all, the artist strays from reality, from “the fact that we are in an irreparable world”, personified by the piano losing its keys one by one in a black and white avalanche… or by the car, made of bones, a man attempts to fix.
“Living is learning to die” says Tomi.
To alchemists, death is equal to life in the process of transformation, the starting point. Then comes purification and recombination towards perfect union, fusion. Thus, what was dead comes alive. Tomi emphasizes that he was born out of death, having barely known his
watchmaker father – and has consciously ignored the passing of time, while revelling in an ambiguous relationship to the representation of death. Death is everywhere, both discreet, all-encompassing, sardonic, and cumbersome. In his work, death is the beginning and the end,
foreshadowing a transmutation.
Death is the void beyond a cliff off which a skeleton, wearing wings and aviation goggles, is about to jump; death also sneers behind its clown nose or gives a final blessing under a priest’s robes. But death is mostly this black shadow, ever behind us, or a large door opening unto mountain vista where water flows in a long, calm river.
Agate Bortolussi

WEGMAN – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:59:52 +0000

William Wegman’s first monographic exhibition at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois offers a journey through the artist’s work, emphasizing its deep consistency across various techniques and subject matters.

Bringing together over 60 works, ranging from 1970 to 2022 and selected in conjunction with William Wegman and Christine Burgin, the exhibition revolves around the notion of agility, a recreational and athletic discipline partnering man and dog. “I’ve always considered my work a shared recreational activity,” claims William Wegman. In his pictures, the dog is no longer a mute bystander, such as Carpaccio’s German Spitz, a background actor like Picasso’s teckel Lump, or merely a ‘little assistant’, as Martin Luther dubbed his Pomeranian, but an equal partner in the creative process. One could compare this relationship of ‘disciplined spontaneity’ or ‘stimulated attention benefitting both dog and owner’ to the one discussed by American philosopher Donna Haraway relating to agility in her 2003 book, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People & Significant Otherness: an “ontological choreography, a vital game invented by participants from stories of body and spirit they inherit and adapt in order to compose the flesh verbs that make them who they are.”

The William Wegman, Agility Conceptuelle exhibition spans both of the gallery’s spaces, 33 and 36 rue de Seine. Each space orchestrates the interaction between photography, film, painting, drawing, writing… and creates a dialogue between iconic pieces featuring Man Ray (1970-1982), Fay (1986-1995), and other members of their illustrious Weimaraner dynasty – so indubitably linked to the artist’s life and work – with many unpublished works, with or without dogs.

At 36 rue de Seine, Spaces of Species gathers together, in a constant play of fluidity and metamorphosis, works which blur and abolish borders between different types of spaces (pictorial, architectural, two- and three- dimensional…), species (man, dog, other animals, talking objects), genres and categories. Together, as enunciated (once again) by Donna Haraway, “they invent this game; this game transforms them.”

At 33 rue de Seine, the exhibition’s second facet, Significant Otherness revolves around the very notion of playfulness, an essential element of the conceptual art sphere to which William Wegman is central: ball games, agility games, language games. These are two-person games where diptychs, duos, double imageries, combinatory and permutation effects favor the jubilatory relationship between companion species, beyond any kind of essentialism.

Martin Bethenod

MACHNEVA – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 14:03:49 +0000

Zhenya Machneva was born in 1988 in Leningrad, a Soviet city whose name existed between 1924 and 1991, also known as St. Petersburg. From the beginning there is the story of a disappearance, of a ghost. During her studies at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Zhenya Machneva chose to train in the textile department. She is immediately struck and seduced by weaving techniques. At this time, she is not yet free of the subjects she wishes to weave, the tapestry is confined to a strictly decorative function. A function and a role that she will shift when she starts working alone in her studio.On two manual looms, she creates tapestries representing industrial landscapes, factories emptied of their workers, useless machines, patterns and colors. Why would you try to represent by hand a heritage that no one seems to care about anymore? The artist finds in it a family history, as well as the fallen fantasy of an era. She points out that “the Soviet industrial period has enjoyed great glory, but now what we can see are just collapsed dreams.It seems important to me to collect different objects and different landscapes in the process of disappearing.” Like an archaeologist from the Soviet industrial era, Zhenya Machneva begins by visiting the factory where her grandfather worked. On site, the machines appear to her as sculptures, organisms and autonomous entities. She needs to «touch her subject.» Before weaving, she sets off to explore deserted factories, abandoned sheds, wastelands turned into landfills. On site, she photographs what she calls «patterns.» The collection of images will give rise to extremely graphic drawings rendered in black and white. The drawings are the sketches from which she will implement the tapestries. Zhenya Machneva creates a contrast between subject and technique. The steel is made visible by cotton, the rate of work at the factory gives way to slowness, while the weight, coldness and rigidity of the buildings are soft and subtle in the weaving. The black and white drawings are transformed into colorful tapestries. Colors are intuitively chosen.

Zhenya Machneva wants to maintain a part of improvisation within a laborious manual process. “I hope that you can feel my energy through the works.” The choice of tapestry is physical. Zhenya Machneva gives the technique an organic dimension to which it is intimately attached. Sitting in front of the loom, the artist tirelessly repeats the same gestures to generate successive frames. Repetition, slowness and loneliness are part of a meditative state in which each cotton thread becomes a mantra. A gestural repetition that echoes that once applied by workers, active in these factories that today are ghosts. The choice of tapestry is also political. If you look at the history of art, tapestry is a medium.

It has an authoritarian, timeless, sensory aspect. Through the thread and the loom, Zhenya Machneva represents the Soviet industrial heritage that has become invisible and unproductive. The motifs, machines and buildings are the archives of a bygone era, a time when industrialization and the figure of the worker were over-glorified. A vanished era of which barely visible ghosts remain. It is then for the artist to embody this heritage to give it a new existence.The making of tapestries is a physical incarnation, but also metaphorical. She pays particular attention to patterns, or to the details of machines whose zoomorphism or anthropomorphism she accentuates. She then plays with the pareidolia, which brings out familiar faces, skulls and other forms.The artist thus engages a new reading of the woven motifs by opening a fictional space. Through her weft threads and her chain threads, Zhenya Machneva awakens ghosts, revives and makes the poetry of sleeping landscapes palpable.

Julie Crenn

ALBARRACIN – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 13:53:20 +0000

Pilar Albarracín makes transgression and humor both plastic and political tools. Since the early 1990s, the Spanish artist has opened areas of feminist claims through her works. For this, she chose to analyze in a viscerally critical way the Andalusian folklore, popular culture and vernacular. She thus examines the culture which has been transmitted to her and constitutes a large part of her identity. From flamenco to Catholic rituals, bullfighting and baroque art, the artist takes each tradition head on. By physically imposing herself at the heart of powerful territories and symbols of a patriarchal culture, Pilar Albarracín is claiming part of a collective history, that of women. With undisguised anger, she exaggerates, she multiplies, she moves, she assaults or strangles stereotypes and ancestral traditions. In this, she appropriates costumes, props, symbols and decorum of rituals where men and women are confined to specific roles. If we focus exclusively on women, their roles and modes of representation are particularly limited and/or invisible. The actions, photographs, embroidery and misappropriated objects aim to deconstruct these roles and to become aware of the shortcomings, absences and prohibitions. The rituals she invests and revisits are inscribed in an identity thought guided by religious morality and patriarchal ideology that the artist strives to turn around and undo.

Pilar Albarracín’s new exhibition in Paris is based on a critical and political exploration of the Semana Santa («Holy Week») in Seville. For a week in April, the whole city lives to the rhythm of plural and thematic processions. About sixty fraternities commemorate the Passion of Christ by carrying pasos, richly decorated floats on which are placed extremely heavy sculptures. According to long and precise routes, the men carry the pasos at arm’s length to reach the cathedral of Seville and do penance. In absolute silence or, on the contrary, in musical effervescence, hundreds or even thousands of men move painfully towards the same geographical point. Pilar Albarracín then questions these spectacularly painful processions during which bodies are tested by beliefs, the weight of morality and respect for traditions. The new works are more tinged with violence and solemnity than with humor and irony. She proceeds in this way by blasphemous gestures to make palpable an oppression and suffocation generated by ideologies and the idea of a Spanish identity. The artist relies on the codes of Baroque art to dramatize gestures, emotions, postures and objects.

Albarracín plays with the highly theatrical dimension of religious rituals to create images with powerful symbolic power. She holds a mirror to the violence inherent in the authoritarian systems against which she struggles. The title of the exhibition contains an order, then a request: no apagues mi fuego, dejame arder, «don’t put out my fire, let me burn». The fire that must not be extinguished by the other is that of her commitment, her convictions, her history, her body. She asks that the other let her burn, in hell as is implied, if that is her choice. Individual choice is at the heart of the artist’s plastic and critical reflection. During the 1970s, feminist activists advocated, and still advocate today: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. By taking up the codes and decorum of the dominant ideologies, Pilar Albarracín fights against the guidelines, taboos, morals and prohibitions that regulate and shape bodies. Through her work, she continues to demand the fundamental right to self-determination.

Julie Crenn

PEYBAK – VALLOIS

Galleries — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 14:04:39 +0000

The Iranian duo Peybak -Peyman Barabadi and Babak Alebrahim Dehkordi- returns for a third solo show at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois and continues to tell us stories depicted through their two pairs of hands. Following Abrakan (Birth) in 2015 and Abrakan “Sparkle” in 2017, the artists lead us today into the depths of the earth with the central figure of the well, Abra-Chah in Farsi, around which all sorts of peculiar creatures will gravitate and individualize themselves.
The small people of Peybak’s works are humanized over time, they indulge in many enigmatic activities in the middle of a twilight desert. At the heart of this mystical landscape of deep ochres and blues, the cryptic figures are detailed, unveiling their faces, their looks and their know-how. In the many scenes with elaborate frames, the creatures dance, hunt, fight, just as much as they peacefully and quietly gather themselves. Peybak reveals a dreamlike civilization whose paintings, scepters and notebooks are archaeological remains.
As the ancestors still relate, Peybak tells us: “In a barren place at the westernmost point from the eastern reaches, far from the light of the sun, there is a bottomless well named «Abra-Chah»; no one can venture into its depths. When the sun rises, the howls and cries of angels, demons and wild beasts, farm animals and men are heard followed by a foul stench. As the hours go by, the Abrakans gather around the well and pray, confide in it and treat the well as a person in its own right… By the end of the day and at the beginning of the night, the moon rises from this well and illuminates for miles around. Under this light, they tell their secrets to the well. A shrub grows inside the abyss and from its branches, the Abrakans shape the sticks that help them clear their passage on dark and unknown paths”.
Peybak’s world can put us in a hypnotic state, it takes us without warning, and it moves us. Abrakan is our ancestralism, our archaism: we are Abrakan.

LE VAISSEAU D’OR – VALLOIS

Galleries — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 13:46:53 +0000

With Gilles Barbier, Bianca Bondi, Alice Guittard, Matthieu Haberard, Charlotte Heninger, Edward Kienholz, Benjamin Loyauté, Gaspard Maîtrepierre, Lucie Picandet,
Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri

Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!
Arthur Rimbaud, extract from « Adieu », in A Season in Hell, April-August 1873, as translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row.
Exhibitions are born for thousands of reasons and one of them is sometimes a matter of friendship. From time to time, it is a question of elective affinity, this complex process that takes root in the history of medieval alchemy «to explain the attraction and fusion of bodies». (1) For my part, I have never wanted an exhibition to be too explicitly a slave to a subject. On the contrary, I prefer that it allows us to mix artworks that then become like beings and which, in some cases, produce a new aesthetic material, at the heart of the athanor. We do experiments, we do exhibitions, not presentations. We tell stories. It is all about letting your mind waver, like when you walk from gallery to gallery on a weekday with your fists in your pockets. Anger, drunkenness, snapshot of contrasts.

But at the local café, we realize that galleries are perhaps like borders, beaches or cliffs at the corner of the street, that separate us from the mainland of our urban boredom. Rare places in the city where anything remains possible.
From this beach, therefore, it seemed possible to show something of the bowels of this great golden ship, with multicolored flags, of which Rimbaud speaks.

Let the artists invent this excavation, in the present, all in the same boat: when it runs aground and breaks open, they invent themselves. So yes, come new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages. Let everything connect on the immaterial sand of the gallery. Whether they are known or not, it doesn’t matter, since they recognize each other. Careers, all mixed up, are as many fantastic journeys as history forgets, transforms into legends, or into posterity. This great golden vessel moves away obliquely as one approaches it: it multiplies and pulverizes to float better, like an intuition.