Galleries in Paris » DARD

MORIN – DARD

Galleries — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 09:05:11 +0000

Poison and Opium
Justin Morin’s work lies at the borders of two different worlds. On the one hand is the world of art into which he frequently dips for inspiration, in particular looking back at the art of the Sixties. The form of expression used in his polished steel bars,silky colour gradients and kinetic sculptures is reminiscent of New York minimalism, the Californian Light and Space movement and Op art. On the other hand lies the world of fashion, fashion as an industry, which far from being limited to the universe of the catwalk, also deals with the design and production of clothing, accessories and cosmetics, as well as creating an imagery around its products, in other words marketing them. The exhibition highlights this awareness of the world of fashion on many different levels, the most obvious being the pair of shoes that their ownerseems to have left behind on the floor of the gallery. They evoke the current fashion for jewelled shoes: shoes that are increasingly beautiful, sculptural, strange and luxurious and less and less wearable it has to be said (here the soles are made out of concrete).
What is particularly interesting in this double positioning is less the fact of being part of a niche that has been exploited to the full for the last 15 years (the artist caught between art and fashion) than what this position allows Justin Morin to say about each of the two worlds. The worlds of art and fashion, that when all’s said and doneare not so close as some might think, could be described as two industries producing objects of beauty and Justin Morin reveals some of the principles that underlie their workings.
The term industry implies a means of production as well as the implementation of marketing strategies, such as the rapid renewal of the offer (fast fashion), the creation of more and more specialised niches to identify products and trends created from nothing. As well as being a repertoire of forms that may be borrowed to good effect, kinetic art also allows Justin Morin to highlight those sudden and all-powerful fads that sweep through both the worlds of art and fashion. At the start of kinetic art, there was a widespread craze for this new art form. The term Bridget mania was coined (after Bridget Riley and in reference to Beatlemania) and kinetic art was almost immediately overexploited, used in many and varied forms (textiles, TV set decors, film credits and motifs of every imaginable sort) to such a extent that Riley herself went to court to stop the commercial exploitation of her work. It then came to be considered dated and was sent to the art history purgatory during three whole decades, simply because it was so widely present throughout the Sixties and the Seventies. Vasarely for example still makes people cringe. At the moment, it is the object of a new wave of enthusiasm amongst specialists, collectors and the general public, the extent of which could be gauged at the recent Parisian exhibitions on Julio Le Parc and Perceptual art.
Justin Morin also takes an interest in how advertising creates value, a process that is fundamentally based on the production of photographic images (and more recently of short films). The source images for the silky colour gradients in his series How to drape are mainly drawn from the iconography of advertising on which television, cinema, the press and Internet all thrive and in which luxury, celebrity and fashion come together in a cocktail with the same imperative: seduction. What Justin Morin finds most interesting however is that most special moment when the imperative metamorphoses objects and bodies into images, a photographic alchemy which lies at the heart of the mechanics of advertising. The poison in the exhibition’s title could be understood as a criticism of the workings of this society of the spectacle, or at least as evoking the artist’s doubts as he observes a system that has become almost toxic as it tries to outdo itself turning images into a poison.
In our opinion however, it is more a reference to Christian Dior’s perfume Poison that was so popular in the 80s. It is also an indication of the artist’s continued quest to understand the nature of beauty, a questioning that is made clear in his series How to drape, but which underlies his entire body of work. How can one manage to create a beautiful drape, a beautiful bouquet, a beautiful sculpture, a beautiful exhibition? He already suggested one possible answer with La Ligne d’Hogarth (Hogarth’s line) that referred, by means of a bouquet, to one of the principles of composition as defended by the English artist in The Analysis of Beauty.
With Poison, Justin Morin is seeking the principles of beauty elsewhere, in the sensuality of oriental fragrances to be exact. The exhibition could just as easily have been called Opium because it immerses us in a concept of beauty dear to Baudelaire, torn between modernity and classicism, composed of benzoin, incense and venomous flowers, but also shop windows, goods, large cities and cosmetics. Baudelaire’s vision of beauty is laid out for all to see, but it is not clear whether the artist really adheres to the concept. In spite of these lingering doubts about the possibility of a form of beauty that could speak to everybody, and even of the very existence of a valid answer to the questions which float over this entire body of work like so many silken veils, one desire remains: that a work of art, whatever it may be, no longer offers itself to the spectator as an image does, but like a perfume. That it does not try to seduce the spectator at first sight, but remains constantly present in the mind’s eye now and ever after, like the memory of a heady musky scent that persists long after its wearer has gone.

Jill Gasparina

Justin Morin and Galerie Jeanroch Dard would like to thank : Charlotte Morel, Joachim de Callatay, Puntoseta and especially Paola di Valentino, Villa Noailles and especially Jean-Pierre Blanc and Magalie Guerin.

DEGREES OF SEPARATION – DARD

Galleries — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:18:00 +0000

with Gabriele Beveridge, James Clarkson, Oliver Osborne, David Ostrowski, Max Ruf, Chris Succo
curated by Rod Barton in partnership with Palais de Tokyo, as part of the event « Nouvelles Vagues »
Claiming it is a Modernist conceit to stick to a chosen medium, the young artists outlined here resist style and media specificity. Rather than referring back to a specific, linear dialog, instead these artists work dispersively, covering a wealth of positions. With consideration to how mass production and the sourcing of digital material from the internet speeds up time and relocates space, these artists choose to work in multiple mediums and styles. Reflecting an informal idea of what historical and contemporary painting is or could be, they reassemble and reshape the painters’ language of Modernism. For them works are not necessarily ‘painted’, as whilst painting is painting, it is simultaneously something else too.
The purpose of this exhibition is to explore the subtexts and links between the artists’ practices, even though the individual’s work may appear in multiple manifestations. Exploring how an audience might make sense of disparate works by an individual artist, Degrees of Separation questions the persistence of commercial trends, whilst expanding the constraints of stylistic interpretation.

Gabriele Beveridge explores the representational qualities of collaged and printed visual ephemera. Expanding upon this mixed media practice, she includes aleatory mark-making exacted across everyday objects and minera-rich forms.
James Clarkson’s interests lay in the relationship between artists’ practice and production specifically in the context of the contemporary environment. Clarkson’s work is a series of ideas or investigations into and around commonplace material and art history.
Oliver Osborne’s work includes elements of monochrome abstraction, collage and still life painting. From painting a rubber plant to using found cartoon imagery, he asserts that a change in form does not entail a change in tone.
David Ostrowski’s unplanned happenings in the studio are his means towards new knowledge; his process is an ongoing struggle to unlearn and rediscover, learning in so doing not just about painting but also reframing his understanding of beauty. His painterly vocabulary equally develops from accidents of form, taking unforeseen lines that appear and recreating them in future works.
Max Ruf’s work departs from the operation of the image and its relationship to landscape, transformation and materiality. From these concerns he establishes an array of frameworks. Journeys, picture books, bronze casts, plein air paintings, toner transfers and slideshows acts as placeholders that lend themselves to be recontextualised within a contingent narrative.
Chris Succo works with a variety of techniques including photography, silkscreen, sculptural elements and abstract oil paintings. These techniques are modified and reconfigured to achieve a recognizable visual language. With these processes he produces unique pieces sometimes belonging to a specific series of works. Failures and rules of his processes create new ideas and images to widen his practice.

LAUMANN-DARD

Galleries — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:52:40 +0000

ANDREW LAUMANN
Desperate Living

Desperate Living is a collection of works influenced by aesthetics found in «no where zones» of Baltimore, wooded areas tucked in between the population where forgotten people reside. The name pulled from John Waters’ 1977 film of the same title, Laumann likens the plot line of the disenfranchised outcasts creating their own utopia of trash to destruction as a form of creation. The aesthetic parallel between synthetic and orga- nic, natural erosion and urban struggle, re-contextualizing «street art».
These paintings mimic sculptures, the materials used stray from traditional art making materials, instead using found objects. Deconstructing and then reconstructing them, distorting the functional, creating a visual dyslexia.
The Oblivion series discarded flyers from weekly club events are weathered and then scraped and layered as a fine dust, likened to space dust. Untitled (Dog Walker), public communications layered until no message is left but the remnants of the action and suppression. Old Fucking Navy, Seel and Sunshine, repossessed containers melted down distorting the rigid, forcing it from function to abstract. These monochromatic forms yet synthetic mimic natural deconstructed forms like a tree with cancer or rocks molded together from ero- sion.
Andrew Laumann was born (1987) in Baltimore, MD (USA) where he lives and works. He is self taught, instead of enrolling in college he spent his formative years as a drifter around the country. He moved back to Balti- more (2009) and immediately founded the Pent House Gallery. Desperate Living is his first solo exhibition in France.

CLARKSON-DARD

Galleries — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:08:42 +0000

James Clarkson’s work explores the idea of assemblage by using found objects and material, selected for their connection to specific moments of art history. This investigation becomes a mean of identifying the slippages in time and meaning that occur when an object or idea assumes its own formal language outside of its original context.
For his first solo exhibition in France, the UK based artist presents a new and existing body of works that deal with his interests in the surface decoration of early 20th century ceramics, and the way that the manufacture of these surface decorations acts as a form of latent referencing, bringing art historical context to a domestic object. Five Abstract Motifs draws upon the specific working relationship of the Poole Pottery (the Britain’s major manufacturer of ceramics during the early 20th Century) and the Bristish artist Victor Pasmore for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Focusing on Pasmore’s large spiral ceramic mural, Clarkson presents a series of tiled ceramic works that investigate how Pasmore, whilst working as a public artist, developed his work from painting into sculpture.

Clarkson’s exploration of the tension between form and functionalism continues in his series of Upright sculptures. Inspired by the reductive process that mass production of ceramic surface decoration brings about, the works are made of material selected for there simple gestural qualities and likeness to a line drawn by the human hand. Following the same reductive process, Clarkson uses objects from his studio floor. Often the detritus of his working process he uses these objects to create chance compositions that are either transferred directly onto the wall, Scatter Construction, or used as an instruction to generate a new object, Floor Compositions.
Clarkson’s works negotiate the definitions of painting and sculpture, refusing to settle upon clear categories and therefore occupy a precarious position, ever liable to shift and change.

MURPHEY – DARD

Galleries — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 14:48:21 +0000

Doggone Abstraktion : Predominantly in an idiom of straightforward comic realism, much of the material is rooted in autobiographical experience; The work derives from my undergraduate thesis work in 2012. This was a period in my life when, although I was surrounded by Abstract Painters, Gender-Identity-Performance-Artists, Minimalists,
Print Makers, Lifestyle Photographers, Net Artists, CGI Pornographers, and more, I was all alone in a philosophical contemplation which itself focused on metaphysical loneliness.
This exhibition consists of about fifteen abstract paintings. Some of the works begin to exist in an ambiguous place between painting and sculpture, making light of these malleable terms. I continue to use the dog motif as a departure to explore abstraction, while the dog engages in his own exploration of existence itself.
Life’s ruff,

Morgan-Richard Murphey

COOK – DARD

Galleries — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 15:38:33 +0000

Felman is american artist Ethan Cook’s first solo show in France. Born in 1983 in Texas, he lives and works in New York. Ethan Cook has participated in numerous international exhibitions including recent shows at Ed. Varie Gallery (NY); East Hampton Shed (NY); Bodega (Philadelphia); NewGallery (London); Nudashank (Baltimore); and Apache Projects (Greece) among others.
I was born on this land.
Conflict : creating new forms out of surroundings
deliberate by design
There are not illusions here
The forms : (my)time represented and recorded
my life, my work, me: Felman

I’ve lived here my entire life. All you see here before you I’ve made from scratch: cotton and timber. Cotton starts in the fields, timber from below. All my life lay here before you…
Weaving is a method of fabric production in which two distinct sets of yarns or threads are interlaced at right angles to form a fabric or cloth. The longitudinal threads are called the warp and the lateral threads are the weft. The method in which these threads are inter woven affects the characteristics of the cloth. Cloth is usually woven on a loom, a device that holds the warp threads in place while weft threads are woven through them. he way the warp and filling threads interlace with each other is called the weave. The majority of woven products are created with one of three basic weaves: plain weave, satin weave, or twill. Woven cloth can be plain (in one colour or a simple pattern), or can be woven in decorative or artistic designs.
Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame. Modern canvas is usually made of cotton or linen, although historically it was made from hemp. It differs from other heavy cotton fabrics, such as denim, in being plain weave rather than twill weave.
Plain weave (also called tabby weave, linen weave or taffeta weave) is the most basic of three fundamental types of textile weaves. It is strong and hard-wearing. In plain weave, the warp and weft are aligned so they form a simple criss-cross pattern. Each weft thread crosses the warp threads by going over one, then under the next, and so on. The next weft thread goes under the warp threads that its neighbor went over, and vice versa.
Weaving can be summarized as a repetition of these three actions, also called the primary motion of the loom :
- Shedding: where the ends are separated by raising or lowering heald frames (heddles) to form a clear space where the pick can pass.
- Picking: where the weft or pick is propelled across the loom by hand, an air-jet, a rapier or a shuttle.
- Beating-up or battening: where the weft is pushed up against the fell of the cloth by the reed.
The warp is divided into two overlapping groups, or lines (most often adjacent threads belonging to the opposite group) that run in two planes, one above another, so the shuttle can be passed between them in a straight motion. Then, the upper group is lowered by the loom mechanism, and the lower group is raised (shedding), allowing to pass the shuttle in the opposite direction, also in a straight motion.

DOWD – DARD

Galleries — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:45:49 +0000

LUKE DOWD
inauthentics
Galerie Jeanrochdard is pleased to present inauthentics, the first solo show
in France by London-based American artist Luke Dowd.
Luke Dowd’s new group of paintings use close at hand source material: the
window, the floor, a computer screen, a studio doodle, strips of paper and
an old art catalogue. Working between figuration and abstraction and through
slight transformations of the source material, Dowd makes oblique references
to art historical modes such as abstract expression, pop art and minimalism.
Underlying these images, which combine screen-printing and spray-paint, are
notions of origin and authenticity.
Dowd is concerned with the mediation of touch, the replication and
processing of gesture and the support: the stretcher (grid) and the canvas
(fabric). He works on canvas, employs printmaking processes and contingent
applications techniques. Dowd produces the screens and does the printing in
his studio. He uses screen-printing as a gestural tool, a painting tool. The
canvas is stretched on to lightweight stretchers and the surface is flat.
There is a desire for the work to be thin, to physically sit on the surface
- but also to shimmer, to invite and deflect.
Luke Dowd was born in 1970 in New York City and lives and works in London.
He received his MFA from Chelsea College of Art & Design, London. Dowd has
participated in numerous international exhibitions including recent solo
shows at Rod Barton, London; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Jacky
Strenz, Frankfurt; HOTEL, London; The Breeder, Athens and a two-person
exhibition with Giles Round at Whitechapel Project Space in London.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS – DARD

Galleries — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 14:35:58 +0000

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
JOHN M. ARMLEDER – STEFFEN BUNTE – CLAIRE DECET – LUKE DOWD – SAMUEL FRANÇOIS – OLIVIER KOSTA-THÉFAINE – ANDREW LAUMANN – RENATO LEOTTA – KEEGAN MCHARGUE – JUSTIN MORIN – MORGAN-RICHARD MURPHEY – JED OCHMANEK.

For it’s new group show, the gallery Jeanrochdard is pleased to present works from the new artists joining us and thus marking the begining of new exchanges and dialogues. In addition to welcoming new artists, this group show is also the occasion to strengthen the ties with artists the gallery has been representing over the years.
Through its title, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, the exhibition primarily evokes Steven Spielberg’s famous 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is also derived from ufologist J. Allen Hynek’s classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the third kind denotes human observations of « animate beings ». Here, the close encounter is the show itself. An event in which a person (the spectator) witnesses an unidentified object (the works of art). In direct association to Steven Spielberg’s UFO, John M. Armleder’s Furniture Sculpture with it’s colour fading stones, interacts with visitors, and the other works exhibited. Atmospheric, optical and contemplative encounters with images and objects, and the sense we make of them. Close Encounters explores the dialogues generated when the two (the viewer and the work of art) are brought together.
There, through prolonged encounters, the works can accrue meanings and perform functions, perhaps unimagined by the artists themselves, and often outside conventional art world discourse, participating in the rituals and rites of passage of people’s lives. These suburban artists, like Richard Dreyfuss character in the movie, use the objects of everyday life to make visible and tangible works at once ordinary and bizarre revealing and pushing inner and emotional perception forward.
Trying to find the purpose of what we encounter going through the show, we then feel undeniably drawn to an isolated area where something spectacular is about to happen. Understanding contemporary art today therefore increasingly asks for an approach that is sensitive to local and changeable meanings. Then can start the investigation pushing us to look behind and further … what is out there, will we be hypnotically plunged into the artists minds and reach a destination: an infinite peace through an individual and inner dialogue with an artist where it all becomes readable but without a specific script or object.
The whole constitutes an unpredictable tapestry of meaning-making, relationships and interrelationships to which visitors will inevitably contribute through the prisms of their own comprehension.

DECET – DARD

Galleries — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 14:39:37 +0000

Jeanrochdard gallery is happy to present Claire Decet’s first exhibition Tout un monde lointain.
The academic shape taken by the work of Claire Decet appears to be renewing with a certain classicism. Still life, landscape study, or curiosity cabinet compose her repertoire. In keeping with the tradition of these founding themes of art history, her practice, slow and laborious, gives back to time its cohesive force in the development of the work. It is a quiet opposition to the world fast-paced rythm whose « runaway » leads to a disconnection from reality. Franked reality or root of a contemporary form of anxiety.
The concern is there, coming along with an awareness in the work of the artist, who has for daily settin, a nuclear power station. The Centres de production éléctrique nucléaire series plays on tiny variations of the pattern of clouds produced in alternation by the four chimneys of the station. Alteration produced at the rate of the official closures for « maintenance » . This serie expresses the feeling of repetition felt in front of this view seen several times a day. This series of study on the landscape acquires a certain gravity by the presence of the neon 2052 which announces the extension of the power station of Cattenom’s period of exploitation.
While in the countryside, the intrusion of random constructions raised in the middle of vast and flat territories, catches the eyes as well as reduces the space of surrounding nature, in town nature seems this time appropriating the urban space. Flower pots, window boxes, but also the undesirable and bad plants proliferate.
There is a certain melancholia in the Misères series, where the pattern repetition evokes the standardization of the plants arrangement recreated by urban residents. Walking through the city of Berlin during a residency in 2009, Claire Decet develops a sensibility to this domesticated nature, calling it »inner landscapes ».Landscapes recomposing worlds on window sills or in shop windows.
Begun several years ago, Collection composes a kind of herbarium of dried flowers staged with makeshift vases. A neglected vegetation, a sluggish, dry nature, which seems to recreate a landscape in reduced scale.
Accurate observer of these phenomena, Claire Decet puts a glance on these questions. She reveals us the disturbing beauty hidden in the visible darkness. Landscapes of nuclear power station, abandoned vegetations … her topics are treated with a quite particular melancholy. Her colorful, neat and smooth from appearance reveal all the fragility of our societies.

FRANCOIS – DARD

Galleries — Sun, 13 May 2012 14:03:49 +0000

For too long a time affiliated to urban art (a label so vague that it would be better to ban it definitively), Samuel François demonstrates with RECENT WORKS that his work easily exceeds the city and its outskirts. Skillful back and forth between ornamental, minimalism and surrealism, his new productions build up a personal museum.
From this path made of dead ends and multiplied down roads, the French artist (born in 1977 in Pompey, Lorraine) proposes a set of works widely inspired by the classic codes of museography. RECENT WORKS echoes OPEN 4 BUSINESS, his last exhibition at the gallery ALICE in Brussels. Monochrome cotton canvases stretched on frames, black structures freely inspired by some furniture, and a slide show compose this third personal exhibition of Samuel François at the gallery JeanrochDard. Proof is that, if Samuel François is unconventional, he is also rigorous. Playing delicately with the codes of varied currents, he succeeds in creating a formal and sensitive balance. Balance where the past and its nostalgic tints, spread out through biographical elements (more or less identifiable), infuse in an unstructured and branched out present.

The geographical location of the artist tells a lot about his inspirations. Based in Lorraine, in the small town of Hettange-Grande (around thirty kilometers from Metz, but also the borders of Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany), he made his first artistic statements outside in nature, painting very eighties patterns (confettis and party streamers) on the military bunkers surrounding the area. Very quickly, his practice of graffiti enriched itself with influences from graphic design, until it finally totally free itself from these disciplines.
His color gradations pieces – the Spontaneous series – illustrate this evolution : vast chromatic landscapes spray-painted on paper, between photographic emulsion and vectorized images. The landscape – and the ballads brings out – is one of the recurrent themes of his production. In February 2011, he proposed, as curator, the exhibition A new idea of landscape where he presented several artists of his generation that he claims as direct influences, both for their work and for the way they proceed. Among them are American artist Israel Lund and Italian artist Renato Leotta. Artistic friendships often begins via exchanges on the internet.
Far from being insignificant, Internet is a key element in the understanding of Samuel François’s world. In the service of his artistic acuteness, websites teem with images waiting to be revealed, added, duplicated or refocused. Thus, in October 2011, he presented No I’m waiting for…, a huge neon produced on the occasion of Nuit Blanche, as the promise of a work to come.