Sometimes

Even several times

You happen to put huge energy into making tunnels, as Rejane Ereau recalls in “l’ascension horizontale”, everyone has the tunnels of realities he needs in order to get out of them.

Through his daily exercise of making the drawing of the day, Ramuntcho Matta practices in a space where the drawing calls the text, in order to build a mental space in which the magic of the sentence rhythm triggers a special time.

For this is what it is about: in order to escape from the inherent acceleration of time with the use of social networks, Ramuntcho Matta proposes to slow down.

Anything can happen, arise, sprout…

In his Histoire chuchotée de l’art (a long voiced poem in twelve stanzas recorded for the first time in Copenhagen in 1963), Robert Filliou uses the phrase of “permanent creation” to name all the shapes of human inventiveness, whether it results in a work, or remains an idea. No known date, no famous name in this Histoire. “Whatever you think, think something else. Whatever you do, do something else. The absolute secret of permanent creation : do not want anything, do not decide anything, do not choose anything, be aware of yourself, remain awoke, sit calm and do nothing.” This aptitude for believing no longer that art means the steady making of works, confined in the studio, but as a daily liberating practice which frees you from the shackles of thinking is somehow very Zen. It is not surprising that Robert Filliou, at the end of his life, retired in a Buddhist monastery.

It is also not surprising that Ramuntcho Matta  often refers to Robert Filliou when speaking of his own practice.

“What is living intensely?” the artist asks. You can recognize a way of thinking issued from the twentieth avant-gardes, all the aesthetic revolutions, which advocated going beyond art for the benefice of the emancipation of self and/or of society. You rarely hear such views today in the comments of an exhibition. Situationism – to live in the present time, like a work in itself- seems an outdated and fusty concept in a world where what is urgent is different. Potlatch and pure expenses are no longer relevant. The time is no longer for intensity but for slowing down and decrease.

Ramuntcho Matta has the blood of experimentation in his veins. This is why he is not only a gallery plastic artist, but writes, composes and produces music with sometimeStudio label, and founded, in 2018, Lizières program, hosting all kinds of artists and spectators for traineeships or residences with reflection and the making of works: “The name of Lizières is due to the fact that I  feel much attention is given to what is central, whereas I believe  that interesting things are on the fringe.”

Everything is only experience…

Eric Mangion

A circular form made with books is presented to the viewer on an armature at chest height, the spines of more than two-hundred volumes facing inward. The books are editions of a single title, Á Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, first published in 1884. “The word decadent (from Latin, cadere, to fall, to decline), is an exact description of Huysmans’s hyperaesthetic, misanthropic, morbid antihero,” writes Bettina Knapp of the novel’s central character, Duke Jean des Esseintes.[1] She credits the Duke’s “inability to face reality, uncontrollable ennui, and hatred for a society he saw as superficial, banal, vulgar, and materialistic” as the impetus for his self-isolation in a villa on the outskirts of Paris at the end of the 19^th century.[2]

In the 1880s, the Old World is dying and in response Des Esseintes retreats both into himself and into the surfaces of objects, wallowing in their artificiality as though it will save him from the consequences of the epistemic shift to which he is an unwilling witness. Each chapter of the novel delineates a phase of Des Esseintes’ attempt to reverse the order of things. He sleeps during the day and dresses extravagantly at night. He plants a garden with plants that look metallic, flowers that appear too vivid to be alive. He has a jeweled turtle made because of the way the precious stones set off the patterns in a rug in his parlor, on which the creature will later die from the weight of the stones. Turtles, after all, breathe through their shells. Afraid to leave the house, Des Esseintes reasons to himself that movement is futile, that “imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things.”[3] Armed with appropriately Orientalist literature, one could travel effortlessly from one’s fireside without ever leaving its comfort.

Des Esseintes eventually finds himself at an impasse that will be recognizable to viewers in the final months of this disastrous year, 2020. The surfaces of things cannot be made to compensate for the complexity of collective human experience. It does not matter how meticulously you arrange the cut flowers on the entrance table if your mother cannot set foot in your house to appreciate the subtly of their fragrance. In Saadé’s installation, À Rebours, this impasse is rendered formally: because her library takes the shape of a ring, the most yellowed edition of Des Esseintes’ book is adjacent to its freshest edition. The interval between them reminds the viewer that life is cyclical and that there comes point when one cycle must end; continuity is not inexorable.

Based as Saadé is in Beirut, it is impossible not to read the visualization of entropy in À Rebours against a backdrop that Jim Muir, writing on July 13^th 2020 for Orient XXI, describes as “a ship in a wild storm being driven towards the rocks with its engine broken down and the wheel unattended, while seven or eight captains and their crews fight on the deck over who should profit from the cargo, deaf to the cries of distress from desperate and terrified passengers.”[4]Since protests there began on October 17 2019, Lebanon had seen a year of incredible socio-political upheaval, even without the outbreak of COVID-19. In the middle of the worst economic crisis in its modern history, the shortages of even of the most basic food and commodities (fuel, etc.), rolling blackouts, and an 85% devaluation of its currency on the black market are all symptoms of systemic collapse.[5] Talks with the IMF for a crucial fiscal lifeline have, at the time this text went to print, broken down. “The core of the issue is whether there can be unity of purpose in the country,” says the IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva, broadly referring to whether sitting politicians would accept necessary measures to protect the bailout funding from corruption.[6]

Amidst this turmoil, Saadé’s installation, The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust (2020) is centered on the possibility of movement into and out of the home, even under disaster conditions. White diaphanous curtains fall to the floor discretely yellowed with age, marked with stains and the traces of accidents. Though thick enough to distort the view either into or out of the room the fabric is porous to light, a shield but not a retreat from turmoil. These particular curtains hung in Saadé and her brother’s childhood bedroom in Lebanon for twelve years, between 1983 and 1995, and now they hang in Paris in the gallery’s window vitrines. Here too, a continent away, they act like a filter between the street and the exhibition, shielding Saadé’s delicate objects of amnesias, or memory work, from passersby but not completely obstructing their view.

Onto this support, the artist has embroidered twelve trajectories—the number of years she inhabited the room in which they hung. The lines of embroidery sketch trips taken during that interval between her home and those of friends and family members, among many other places that were emblematic at the time. It was not possible to go where one might wish as the country was fractured with no-go zones. These stitched patterns in thick seams of white string represents both the places that were accessible during the Lebanese Civil War and the paths to reach them that were available given the circumstances. White on white, the lines and their visibility from various points of view inside and outside the space of their exhibition attest to the way a child finds meaning and fosters curiosity where others would see only catastrophe and violence.

The other works in the exhibition respond to the present moment with the same impulse to look inward, as we are all forced to do in the current overlapping crises, toward the space of recollection that forms materialize. The installation Memory (2020) is a magic lantern construction that projects archetypal shapes from the children’s game Junior Memory, produced by a German educational game company that was founded in 1883, the year before À Rebours was first published and exactly a century before the artist’s birth. Not all the pairs of the original game are represented, some were lost in the intervening years. Saadé cuts the contours of a rose, a banana, a butterfly, a cockroach, a seahorse, and other foundational semiotic images into a cube illuminated from the inside. The proportions of the box are modeled on those of the room in which the aforementioned curtains once hung.

Luminous silhouettes play along the darkened walls of the installation space, the ghosts of shapes and objects once memorized inside a room, remembered with the same vividness and inevitable distortion as are the trajectories rendered in The Encounter of the First and Last Particles of Dust. One project filters the perspective from outside in, the other projects a perspective from inside outward.

Memory does not re-create the game’s vivid colors and perfect symmetry, both of which were meant to train a young mind’s capacity for recall and their sensitivity to a particular archetypal aesthetic register. For Saadé, memory is not repetition, it is a projection of the mind. The work’s intention is not to have the viewer experience her childhood by way of abstraction. Instead, the circular dance of silhouettes, like the circular progression of volumes in À Rebours, invite the viewer to join. The play of forms (shapes, narratives, trajectories) creates an open space, one that is abstract yet grounded through its indexical references to the artist’s experience. A novel for the end of an age, maps for country at war, bright shapes leaping through the dark (has the electricity been cut again?)—all propose memory as isolated refuge, but also as a warning.

Natasha Marie Llorens
July 2020

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/world/middleeast/beirut-lebanon-economic-crisis.html

[2] https://orientxxi.info/magazine/lebanon-adrift-in-stormy-seas,4026

[3] Bettina L. Knapp, « Huysmans’s « Against the Grain »: The Willed Exile of the Introverted Decadent », Nineteenth-Century French Studies, automne-hiver 1991—1992, Vol. 20, N°1/2, p. 203.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, éd. Rose Fortassier, Lettres françaises, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1981, p. 88.

[6] N.d.T. : Correspondant britannique de BBC News.

Anne barrault gallery is pleased to welcoming the new personal exhibition of Killoffer.

On this occasion the writer Eric Chevillard dedicated a text to his works :
Everything was circumscribed; we suffocated in form. You were born a sucker and that was it, for life. Your skin was so tight on your body that the hair shirt billowed around it like a geisha’s kimono. Girdles constricted your ankles. The boa constrictor of the ego smothered all desire for expansion. All our ten fingers could do was strangle themselves at the joints. Everything turned crimson. We shed tears of blood. Everyone died of apoplexy. Some self-saturated thing was perishing, asphyxiated by its own essence. The cloud itself could only disperse in the cloud.
But that was before.
Boredom arose from the grim fatalism of matter. An itch gnawed at the brick, which was just being brick. The fine dust blowing away was still brick. Bone was no better, crumbling even as the hound slept in its kennel. Flesh necrotised from being flesh, replete with itself ad nauseam. Your texture was smeared onto you like jam. You’d never grow a single feather if you didn’t have a bird’s rump.
That was before. That too was before. In the time of damnation.
Then the famous upheavals occurred. From contagion or love—opinions differ on this point—forms contracted mimetism and matter caught unifying leprosy. Things came together as if magnetised. There were some crashes, some brutal collisions, but it was generally quite gentle, like the groom inside the bride. It was observed that a strong current of sympathy united forms that had been imprisoned by their initial imprint for too long. They tore themselves away from it as one might drag oneself out of the mud. Everything was like a puzzle.
We could breathe, and above all, it was new.
It was the same for substances. Now you sow the grain of your skin like wheat and, as long as you have some land, you’ll have a bumper harvest. Personally, I cover everything with elephant hide. The wisdom of wrinkles will no longer be confused with the decrepit old man, believe me.
At last, we are no longer trapped by our idiosyncrasy. Everything fits together and interlocks perfectly and at will. Lines blur so that your successive silhouettes make up the still moving crowd of your ways-of-being and your options. Your shadow is everywhere in the night. Far beyond your young flesh, its blood irrigates organs you might need in others.
We didn’t need to make such an effort to win this freedom. Just pulling the string and undoing the knot would doubtless have sufficed. Opening the bag and feeding the shy monster that crept out. It’s odd, though, that we didn’t think about that before. What fear held us back inside, nestling within, huddled in the depths?
One day the skeleton had had enough watching over the corpse. The marrow coursed through the long and short bones. He left the boring bloke behind him to set off on an adventure with his wife, who was moping about in the nude as if wrapped in a shroud.
Without this bold step, everything would have carried on as before. A life without redemption, without metamorphosis. The new-born babe swaddled once and for all in the mummy’s bandages. We were lucky.
Eric Chevillard, 2016.