Galleries in Paris » Galerie In Situ

NAVE – IN SITU

Galleries — Wed, 14 May 2025 14:12:26 +0000

Born in 1974, Beer Sheva, IL
Works and lives between Paris, FR & Tel Aviv, IL

The main question driving Amir Nave’s artistic research is fundamentally motivated by many approaches to elaborate one distinct thing – Is it possible to deliver something valuable from the present to eternity?

Questions about time, space, boundaries, seclusion, power relationships between people and within a person, trying to break down everything that is unequivocal, are building the framework for the main subject studied by the artist, the pain of consciousness.

In his process, Amir Nave first destroys everything that represents a value, place, morality or limit for him, until all ‘life’ is gone and only chaos remains. In his works, destruction tells more than construction and the struggle within his painting is connected to the relationship between emptiness and remove ‘the’ fullness. Emptiness being outside the realm of language can provoke creativity because it is our way of describing something that we cannot fully conceive of. The emptiness on his works also participates in focusing attention on the body and particularly on the head, the central point of his painting.

From here, the artist attempts to rebuild the world once again. There are faded landscapes, in which figures are walking, whose body is a bag of needs – allegories of the decline of the decadent human society in our time.

His figures aim to represent the desire to experience the world, for better or worse. The body is an hourglass and the attempt to confront these springs from the desire not to accept it as absolute but to define it as derived from consciousness.

CORILLON – IN SITU

Galleries — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 14:23:25 +0000

The story of Jeux de paysages [“Landscape Games”] started two years ago with a
visit to the Wellcome Collection in London. An exhibition was being held there
called Play Well 1 that explored the many evolutions to which play activities
led man and society. The visitor could see how it favored the development of
social links, emotion resilience and physical well-being. Of course, all sorts
of toys were displayed but also design objects and artworks The seriesArtificial
Landscape by Constant (1920-2005) attracted Patrick Corillon’s attention because
of their forms, the spontaneous interaction that they caused and the central
place of a narration in which the concept of a city extending to the world was
organized.
This comment is important: these three elements are founders of a substantial
part of Corillon’s work and, in particular, the narrative that his work has
centered on since the 1980s to deploy a scholarly and dense body of work. The
question of the reality of the imagination holds a privileged place in it. The
“genuine fictions” that he writes in the objective observation style is shown by
the production of tangible objects. In the same way, Patrick Corillon bases his
research on broadly shared common realities and experiences; here, toys that are
or were well-known. They share the virtues of obviousness and simplicity of daily
life and things that are readily available. All encourage interactivity: this
concerns undergoing a test; for the public, “intervening” replaces “looking.”
Consequently Les Yeux du paysage [“The Landscape’s Eyes”] follows a widespread
model according to which the player must balance a tray in such a way as the
marbles are inserted into the holes created for this purpose to provide a
character with eyes. The difference here is that the game doesn’t stop once the
marbles are immobilized.
20 february – 26 march 2022
OPENING : SUNDAY FEBRUARY 20TH 2022, 2 PM – 6 PM
GUIDED TOUR / PERFORMANCE SUNDAY FEBRUARY 20TH, AT 3 PMOne of them has letters and the other numbers.? Following the rules of the game,
the player must continue by creating associations elements relative as much to
the exterior world (since the names of a city, a river, etc. must be given) as to
spiritual or sentimental life. And then, there is the character using a cane. It
is the Wandering Jew with the group of meanings that he carries with him. Waiting
for the hypothetical return of Christ, he crisscrosses the Earth without respite
and appears here and there: Corillon prints his image on an old urban map or
“views” among which painting connoisseurs will recognize Hubert Robert’s style.
The exhibition’s title is explicit: it directly expresses a double anchoring, on
one hand, on games and, on the other, landscapes. Apart from joining two themes,
Corillon intertwines his proposals. The different pieces call out to each other.
Thus, the Wandering Jew reappears in Le paysage sans fin [“The Endless Landscape”].
Here, the player manipulates 10 watercolors composed according to the where the
continuity elements are placed – five in total including of course the horizon
line – in such a way that they are randomly juxtaposed… not really randomly since
each movement lets new combinations of motifs and therefore new stories appear.
As always in Patrick Corillon, the reading of his work has multiple thicknesses.
Beyond the play activity, we can let ourselves be carried into a labyrinth of
meaning. Moreover, the artist invites us into it by, for example, specifying
that the 10 paintings are “after”: after an anonymous artist of the Roman period,
but also after Patenir, Poussin and Giorgione, whose famous work The Tempest we
recognize in it. It also refers us to the Persian miniature through the palette,
the graphic style, the perspective system and the referential device of the
human figures and architectures. Among other things, the work therefore harbors
reflections on the construction of the imaginary dimension (how do we build
it? starting from what heritage?), on the capacity of our vision of the world
to be broadly communicated (how can it function in another culture?) and on a
reconciliation of civilizations.
Patrick Corillon’s work activates metaphors, symbols and archetypes. We see
it with the series of performances reprised under the title Dans l’amitié de
mes genoux [“In My Knee’s Friendship”]: four 50-minute travel tales, narrated
by an actress, that participants follow through game boards to be animated.
“this series proposes an intimate and sensorial experience,” the artist states.
“Its objective is to thrust the spectators into a story in which they become
the actors. The central question being: how do we physically and poetically
appropriate our landscapes, feel like a genuine actor of them so that we can
project ourselves into an environmental and climate future?” 2 There are cubes
to be assembled ( Cœurs de pierre [“Stone Hearts”]), fabrics to be unrolled ( Le
cirque des montagnes [“The Mountain Circus”]), disks to turn (Le voyage de la
flaque [The Puddle’s Journey”]) and for Le dessous-dessus [“The Below Above”],beads to slide along a thread. The latter trace the initiation journey of the
“metronome worm,” the depths of the Earth in open air, with its pitfalls – a pocket
of shale oil – its symbolic engagements – a skull evoking death, the vanity of
existence or of ancestors – and its encounters with different creatures such as a
mole, a blackbird and two children. There is a great deal to say about the materials
used and the meaning of the beads, which varies from one culture to another, or about
the educational value of play. “The metronome worm,” Patrick Corillon continues,
“learns to move, to think and to act by itself, breaking with the ‘regularity’
of its predetermined destiny to appropriate its own rhythm.” 3 It is therefore a
question of undergoing a test involving learning, transmission and emancipation.

1 Play Well, from October 24 2019 to March 8, 2020, Wellcome Collection, London.
2 Interview with Patrick Corillon, Liège, January 6, 2022.
3 Idem

Texte : Pierre Henrion, january 2022

NKANGA – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 14:49:09 +0000

Visual artist and performer, Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Kano, Nigeria) first studied
art at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ifé, Nigeria, and later at the Ecole
Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She was resident at the Rijksasademie van
beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, before obtaining a master’s degree in Performing
Arts at Dasarts, Amsterdam in 2008. Today she lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.
Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, performances and sculptures
question the notion of territory and the value given to natural resources in
different ways.
Her work presents the viewer with images that reveal a strong evocative power.
A wide variety of material and media give shape to works inspired by the Earth,
its over-exploited resources and the narratives that flow out from it. Her art
is located at the intersection of temporal and civilizational constructions and
thus expands beyond our horizons towards both different climates and different
economies.
Despite a refined aesthetic that may appear free of tension at first glance,
Otobong Nkanga’s works demonstrate a strong evocative power with depictions of
unstructured bodies whose disjointed limbs are linked together by ropes, roots or
branches. Far more than a visual collage, these links create a genuine network of
forms that repeatedly reverberate throughout a wide variety of media: drawings,
installations, paintings, textiles, photographs, sculptures, performances and
even poetry. Everything appears evolving and connected, in total interdependence,
like associative chains that the artist constructs little by little.
January 9 – February 12 2022
OPENING : January 9 2022, 2pm – 6pmFor her second exhibition at the Galerie In Situ, the artist presents several
recent works and also some older pieces that create a link, as always, with her
previous projects, such as the two sculptures “Post I” and “Post II” (2019). With
a height corresponding to the artist’s height, these sculptures form a sort of
metal carousel that employs twenty-four plates on which landscape images from all
over the world are printed—locations marked by trauma and littered with debris.
The wood panel painting «Borrowed Light – …» (2019) shows three arms connected
to each other by cables while being linked to a hollowed-out polygon, creating a
mechanical and stylized aesthetic highly representative of the artist’s graphic
work.
Several tapestries created for the exhibition reinterpret abstract fragments of
previous tapestry works in order to give them a new life. The artist sometimes
introduces plants and oxidized metals into these tapestries, resonating with the
color palettes of the threads that were used to weave the textiles. Initially, these
palettes were also present in several of Otobong Nkanga’s drawings, emphasizing
a relationship to raw materials that lies at the origin of her creations.
An installation made up by a hand-woven carpet, to which Murano glass objects
containing plant materials are connected by long ropes, invites the visitor to
lie down and restore his or her energy.
A selection of drawings will finally complete the exhibition.
In parallel to her solo presention, Otobong Nkanga also wished to invite four
African artists to participate in “Togethering,” thereby aiming to incite
exchange, emotions, organic relationships and connections.

JOREIGE & HADJITHOMAS – IN SITU

Galleries — Wed, 15 Dec 2021 13:59:11 +0000

Rewind /fast forward

The territory on which we stand trembles, wavers, collapses?
Intense temporal and spatial collisions, continuities and discontinuities, everything is upside down. The past on the surface and the present well buried, the future untraceable?
Rupture, catastrophe, we wait for regeneration.
Then we scrutinize the world under our feet.
An aborted space museum under a heliport in a modernist international fair in Tripoli, Lebanon, built by Oscar Niemeyer but left unfinished.
A mythical Roman city, extraordinarily preserved, a mini-Pompei buried under a refugee camp in northern Lebanon, which reappears on the surface before disappearing again.
An underground survey revealing that a 45 meter high mountain is nothing but the accumulation of 25 years of techno-fossils waste.
Possible and sometimes postponed stories, secret stories, waiting, for those who still need to believe.

DION – IN SITU

Galleries — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:24:40 +0000

BACK TO SCHOOL

Born in 1961, New Bedford, Massachusetts, US
Lives and works in New York, US

Known for his complex installations inspired by the Wunderkammern as scientific laboratories, Mark Dion is particularly interested in man’s relationship to nature through the construction of knowledge and scientific discourses in use since antiquity.

His projects are often strangely evocative of naturalist and archeological expeditions, sometimes even implicating the artist personally, who finds himself imitating the explorer, the biochemist, the detective or the archeologist in uniform or behavior.

What ensues are installations evocative of the cabinets of curiosity popular across Europe in the 16th century, but with quite different intentions. Mark Dion not only imitates but also subverts the penchant for classification: he appropriates methods, qualities and vocabularies in order to call both knowledge and the display of knowledge into question.

The humor and intentional absurdity of his works rapidly divulge the deep desire of the artist to confront the limits of scientific knowledge with Nature’s reality.

Extract from Tableau noir, Natacha Pugnet, 2021 :

« Retour à l’école [Back to School], Mark Dion’s latest exhibition at the In Situ Fabienne Leclerc gallery, is focused on extinction and expresses a certain nostalgia. “Understanding how, when and why we have evolved toward societies whose relationship with the environment is suicidal,1” is what seems to be at stake. For an artist, how can our relationship to the natural world be questioned if not from the retrospective angle of its representations? The title sets the conceptual framework of works that miming old didactic models, probe their heuristic value. Dion has long been motivated by ecological questions, but the so urgent nature today of political decisions that should be made required a bit of updating. Intertwining past, present and future, arts and sciences, the marvelous and a rationalist approach, humor and darkness, the return to school proposed by Mark Dion proves falsely comfortable. The semblance of a bourgeois décor installed at the exhibition is part of a subtly unstable plan.»

1. Sarina Basta and Armelle Pradalier, « Entretien avec Mark Dion », Mark Dion, Extranaturel, Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions, 2016, p. 148.

PERRAMANT – IN SITU

Galleries — Tue, 18 May 2021 10:52:44 +0000

Extracts from the text Perramant Blue, march 2021

Yannick Haenel

« Where does the painting lead us, if not toward a broadening of the world’s glittering substance? « The body beyond the body is inexhaustible » Artaud wrote: by keeping that floating tension that occupies the body of every living being in it, this body enters the painting. The part of night that the forms retain affects what is destined for the visible in it: Perramant paints this form that still possesses its negative in it. Thus, in continuing to play with what is lost in it, the painting, shows us something that we recognize as being precisely ourselves…

…One must dare, for Bruno Perramant’s painting, to use the word metaphysical: the greatest experience that we undergo on Earth, doing battle with space and time, a prey to forms, open to colors and their inflections that make the body come to life, is a matter of metaphysics and of this permanent broadening that it brings to our thinking….

…Through Bruno Perramant’s iconographic freedom, a world of images that emerge from blackness and continue to rise from this cave that is each being’s night is deployed: forms that are liberated from anguish, a wall of mental images in which what we have in our mind swirls from that Goya-like sleep that creates monsters. A violence of the being is lavished on them through splendid cool colors that destroy the humanist fable: the human species is criminal, hence the flood. »

Presenting a body of about 40 new works, LOVE’S MISSING is Bruno Perramant’s 9th solo exhibition at the Galerie In Situ. Yannick Haenel’s full text about his work will be included in a booklet published for the exhibition by the Galerie In Situ and accompanied by an English translation.