STOP – IN SITU

Galleries — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:42:19 +0000

Stop, let’s stop in this new venue, in this unusual environment. Let’s take the time to explore each floor of the space, from the basement to the terrace, to discover, through an itinerary of works by the gallery’s artists, this new destination of Grand Paris. The periphery questions, it opens new territories. Our urban habits dialogue with an industrial and rural history. Time may seem suspended, far from the frenzy of central Paris.
Stop is also a reflection on the need to give oneself time: reflection, the relationship with others, to the other, to what is different, to reflect on the state of the social world and that of our planet, to equally reread our history?

Komunuma (community or common in Esperanto) brings together, on the same site, several independent public or private entities, connected by contemporary art. The diversity of activities will generate collaborations and discussions, by providing a broad opening onto the world of French and international contemporary plastic creation. We would like the multiplicity of the proposals, on this enormous site, to encourage our public to spend time in it.
To inaugurate this new space, In Situ has decided to show most of the gallery’s artists in order to share with them the discovery of this venue that they will invest in the near future.
In the basement, Gary Hill presents the sound installation ?Up Against Down,? 2008.
The artist’s fragmented body is pressed up against an infinite surface, in extreme tension, whose feeling is heightened by a sound environment comprised of low-frequency waves linked to the pressure of the body. The physicality of the sense takes on a performative dimension here to which the artist is very attached.

Constance Nouvel created for the entrance of the ground floor space a wall work in a corner that questions the new venue’s architecture. Photography, as a starting point, is compared here with its environment, between real space and suggested space.
Drawing is asked here to move out of the flatness of the image in a mise en abyme of the space and its representation.
The architectural particularity of the glazed stairwell captivated the artist Vivien Roubaud, who deployed three fireworks explosions in it using a cascading hanging.
The artist reveals the object’s possibilities, seeking to extract its hidden qualities and their development in the space, and in a moment that is usually impossible for us to grasp.
The first and second levels of the gallery propose group hangings, creating bridges between the works the explore the intersections between art and science, the economy and society, history and memory, great art and popular culture, the idea of territory through environmental disturbances and their consequences?

You will discover Patrick Corillon’s flyer in the Komunuma tote bag.
Between reality and fiction, the Belgian artists ponders what the cultural history of Romainville could be. He will create the performance « A sentimental history of the ventriloquist » on Sunday October 20 starting at 4 p.m. as an avant-première.

NOUVEL – IN SITU

Galleries — Sun, 03 Mar 2019 12:45:32 +0000

What lies behind photos? From her first years at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, in Patrick Tosani’s studio, Constance Nouvel was interested in what constitutes the photographic medium; in La 25 eme image [The 25th photo] (2010), she literally dug into the layers of paper glued together to form reliefs, each stratum of which evoked yet another off?camera (unseen) element. Whether naturalistic or abstract, in two or three dimensions, her photographs, always taken by her, explore the concepts of frame, depth of field, materials used and so on. In her early works, the grid was everywhere, not only in the compositions, but also sometimes in a literal form, printed, for example, on a plexiglas plate placed on a photo (Decors II, 2010). At the Jeune Creation show in 2013, she even exhibited a straightforward photograph of a grid, a piece of cloth turned the wrong way round, the motif, as if by dint of being an obsession, extracted from the photos. A real mystery emanates from these somewhat indeterminate compositions. One is tempted to think that their content hardly matters, but we get caught up in the blues that are a little too blue, the strangely garish greens, the slightly overly bright oranges that colour the water, skies and rocks. Hesitant, we then make out an aquarium photographed from below (Décors XI, 2011), the decor in trompe-l’oeil of an indoor pool in Germany, in which a Riviera landscape appears (Décors XII, 2012), the model of a mountain covered with a glass case through which we catch sight of a diorama (De?cors XIII, 2013). The artifice that reigns over these scenes is significant. Gradually, progressively, Constance Nouvel’s photos began to unfold in space, starting with Bascule [Tipping Point] (2011), a work in which a photograph, which is a little too long, sticks out beyond its frame. What looks like clouds, sea and sand is actually the reflection of the light shining through a window onto a ceiling. There’s a movement from a real space to a suggested space: that of the ceiling, photography and what is out of shot. The sculptural element of these works functions as a real augmentation of photography, which would seem, for the artist, to offer a detour allowing her to reposition herself within her medium. Thus the Persistants [Persistents] (2014) series is made up of pictures pasted on small plaster modules that give them a unique dimension. Over the course of her work, as others have done before her, Constance Nouvel has questioned herself regarding the possible basis for her photographs. With her most recent work, La Derniere Levée [The Last Hand] (2014), she went as far as attempting to put the frame into the image. She created a kind of thread, drawing a maze, which runs to the centre of a maritime landscape at sunset. Out of this colourful vision, all we can make out is a gradation in colour. Gradually, as we approach the middle of the image, we see a relief (like in La 25e Image). The structure of the piece evokes a games tables inlaid with marquetry, games in which the last trick is the most important. Recently, in the Incidences [Incidences] (2013) series, and perhaps in an attempt to escape her own images, Constance Nouvel began some more abstract research. Sheets of white paper were folded and unfolded and then photographed. Then prints of these photos were folded and photographed again repeatedly. Constance Nouvel is looking for «what happens between the capturing of the real and its adaptation as an image». Photos never reproduce reality, this photographer seems to be saying. At best they transpose it.
By ANAEL PIGEAT
Constance Nouvel was born in Courbevoie in 1985. She lives and works in Paris. Translation, Jack Sims

Galleries in Paris » Constance Nouvel

STOP – IN SITU

NOUVEL – IN SITU