Suddenly, a blinding light. Shapes appear, move and waltz, lifted by an invisible breeze. It’s all about suppleness, angles, textures and colors. By looking closely, fragments reveal themselves: they are hair, trees, legs, architectures, blades of grass…. YOON Ji Eun’s latest works tell the story of a world admittedly cracked and floating, but a world that is also stratified, organic and cyclic. In a movement from inwards to outwards, the artist seizes images of division, separation, reshaping or even dispersion. She describes how she sometimes lets herself daydream and feels projected into space. A couple of brief instants, airy and miniscule, she is almost weightless and comes close to void and light.

Confronted with a world in transition, a reality that she cannot grasp, YOON Ji-Eun chooses to take some perspective and reacts by means of figures and shapes decomposing and immaterializing. Bi and tri-dimensionalities are not the only ones cohabitating in her drawings on papers and sculpted woods. The artist activates yet another dimension, which is both temporality and musicality. If certain compositions strike in their verticality, others are multi-focal for everything to appear undulating, shapeshifting, moving. Light and void thus create a world of possibilities. The world can transform and rise again. Grace, utopia and nothingness engage closely with each other.

Suddenly, a blinding light. Shapes appear, move and waltz, lifted by an invisible breeze. It’s all about suppleness, angles, textures and colors. By looking closely, fragments reveal themselves: they are hair, trees, legs, architectures, blades of grass…. YOON Ji Eun’s latest works tell the story of a world admittedly cracked and floating, but a world that is also stratified, organic and cyclic. In a movement from inwards to outwards, the artist seizes images of division, separation, reshaping or even dispersion. She describes how she sometimes lets herself daydream and feels projected into space. A couple of brief instants, airy and miniscule, she is almost weightless and comes close to void and light.

Confronted with a world in transition, a reality that she cannot grasp, YOON Ji-Eun chooses to take some perspective and reacts by means of figures and shapes decomposing and immaterializing. Bi and tri-dimensionalities are not the only ones cohabitating in her drawings on papers and sculpted woods. The artist activates yet another dimension, which is both temporality and musicality. If certain compositions strike in their verticality, others are multi-focal for everything to appear undulating, shapeshifting, moving. Light and void thus create a world of possibilities. The world can transform and rise again. Grace, utopia and nothingness engage closely with each other.

Notions of travels and temporality have been at the chore of YOON Ji Eun’s work for a long time. Scenes from dreams were embedded in everyday life moments, interiors, landscapes. In 2019, antique statues were part of contemporary environments (metro stations, urban architectures, rifts in the landscape), giving life to one of her fundamental concerns, our complex relation to time and reality. YOON Ji Eun felt such a presence, such life in these sculptures and thousand-year-old expressions that a bridge between these far-apart times had been built. In 2020, a residency at the Institut Français in Saint-Louis, Senegal, deeply influenced the artist. She came back struck by the discovery of a societal reality so different from what she knew, marked by the colonial past, lights and nuances she had never considered. Numerous drawings and a praxinoscope were born from this encounter under the sign of synchronicity and erosion of time. From now on, another color, a fluidity and a blur have made their way into YOO Ji-Eun’s work.

Travelling towards the unfinished marks a new chapter. YOON Ji-Eun gives space to turbulence, fragments, glimpses. The world is no longer a static and unalterable frame where one circulates in an almost cyclic manner. The world is instability, mutation, conversion and made of strata that materialize a continuity. Thus, certain drawings unveil horizontal stripes entirely covering the paper. Between these stripes, brightness pierces through, like vision between shutters. Fragile points travel across these spaces in a regular rhythm, specimen, mini-worlds and markers minutely depicted.

Elsewhere, the tunnel is a metaphor for a fractioned and split vision. Obscurity, this visual void experienced through a passage in a tunnel materializes as planes of white alternating with planes of fluid colors. Entire sheets are covered by distinct fragments.

Wood reliefs are another proposition. The medium’s discrete veins recall its organic nature. Areas with multiples colors can be read, contrasting with those drawn with a simple pencil. Vertical shapes are erected, planted like incisions in the composition’s fluidity. Their tridimensionality is even more reinforced by the raw work of the knife and gouge that suggest a pending brutality. In some places, mini-shapes of color explode, bringing a breath, a wind, a sound…

With this new ensemble of works, YOON Ji-Eun makes the promise of a poetic journey in the realms of doubt and the indefinite, and in fine, allows us to embrace a certain relinquishment in favor of a permanent potential.

On planet Earth, the show goes on, waters are rising as well as temperatures. Ininternational organizations, one talks and talks as democracies are slowly slip-sliding, religious wars spreading and spas filling up… In Marlon Wobst’s newest works, united under the rather ambiguous title RELAX, the artist focuses on the microcosmos of the individual against the backdrop of the vast world’s reality.

The artist depicts a hedonistic and lascivious world. He shows us an intimacy, of our body in communication with the Other and its relationship to the environment, to the elements. Bodies are looking for contact, the tactile; they explore in groups or alone; they move, sip, observe, look at each other…exist.

Existing takes on a whole other dimension here since its meaning is also material. With Marlon Wobst, figures emerge completely or partially from the paint substance or felted wool(as goes for the tapestries). Elsewhere they seem to merge, to re-become a simple matter in an abstract surface. Often, an anecdotal detail -such as the plastic band worn in swimming pools -catches our eye. This type of elements, like certain positions particularly funny and almost unsightly, brings in a touch of hyperrealism to a formal tone that is totally different. As a keen observer and manipulator of matter, Marlon Wobst offers us a poignant vision of the contemporary being, where narration and visual substance are closely linked while each offering a lecture within very different frames.

Here is Bayer. He is a surgeon who desperately loves women. In the operation room, his mind floats from one flesh to another as he intervenes on a giant anatomy. Bella, on the other hand, cultivates her body: At the gym, she moves from a machine to the mat, facing the rising sun reflected in the mirror…Maybe, later, she’ll go to the beach and meet hergirlfriends, as painted in In Treue Fest(Holding on together) where women in bikinis and a discreetly green man (!) are making an obscure pact by piling their right hands on a gigantic naked woman. Dark roompresents a space in the dark where naked bodies stand out of the background because of their luminosity. Is it a photographic image getting developed or an orgy? The romps continue in the water -immersion, jumps (Springer), poses, crawl (Brust Rücken Kraul) -before immobilisation (Diskussion), andosmosis with the sun and warm sand (Teint). In the tapestry Die Flucht(The Escape), it’s a race: Four naked women run across the surfaceof a landscape diagonally, chased by a fuchsia-colored man… Maybe a sunburn! Ritt (Ride)captivates because of the power of the bodies going forward and the contrary movement of the horse that turns its head slightly towards the viewer, thus breaking the general impulse.

A distinguished colorist that moves with great ease from a melancholic and impervious tone to another made of humor and pleasures, from the most delicate pastels to bolder and psychedelic colors, Marlon Wobst continues his exploration of different media. Oil painting is here to stay; he likes it mat, more or less thick. Ceramics allow him to translate his universe into three-dimensionality with great originality in the way of articulating and composing large-scale ensembles, as his previous Parisian show L’OASI (2017) showed. A body of paper works was also born: the ensemble presented at DDESSIN 2019(Paris) was an example of it. Then, recently, he developed wool-felt tapestries. These colored fibers –that can stretch, superimpose and be worked both on a flat surface or in volume is a fantastic field of experimentation for Marlon Wobst. They add a raw dimension to the works, recalling animal skins and prehistorical paintings. The tapestries also possess a child-like quality when the three-dimensional figures resemble handmade dolls. But looking at them more closely, it’s the artist’s virtuosity that strikes: The stains and the transparencies of his painting take a new shape and the modeling of his ceramics a new softness.

With RELAX, Marlon Wobst asserts his ability to work as a fiercely efficient and sophisticated master puppeteer. He plays his game of appearing and disappearing, birth and transformation on a stage of quasi-abstract matter, where scenes and skits review contemporary humanity. If lightness, humor and tenderness are very much present, you mustn’t be fooled. The puppeteer has a tight grip.

A source of passion, obsession, fascination, terror –its quantity, itsshapeand other characteristics, flesh is withus, always, in all its various manifestations. As our primary topography, it awakens us and it’s intense presencenever ceases to ‘tickle’ our curiosity, our senses, and in our wanderings connects, allowing fora sense of communion as well astranscendence. Sometimes flesh is only pain, disgust, loathing. Chère chair (Dear Flesh -Fabulous Flesh)sets out examine, to scrutinizethismatter that makes us who we are.

Farida Le Suavé’s sculptures are bothambiguous and dynamic: full of desire, languorous at times, closed on themselves and in flight at others… As for Jeremy Stigter’s photographs, if the camera’s lens appears painfully close, its subject, the female figure, seems strangely distant; a vague sense ofderision lends an odd touch to the display of so much flesh.Luminous shapes, profound obscurities, suggestive, even delicious, shadows… The eye is puzzled, not quite sure whatit beholds.

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OPENING: Thursday April 27th from 6pm to 9 pm with Lene Bødker present.

READING: Tuesday May 23rd at 8pm, writer Belinda Cannone will read excerpts from her essay « S’émerveiller » (« Marveling ») that just got published by Editions Stock.

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Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.
And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

Genesis 3: 7

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The biblical sense of the term knowledge evokes the intimate experience of a mystery. A definition that differs completely from the one inherited from the Age of Enlightenment, which possesses a rational and empirical dimension. Thus, there is a form of paradox that emerges here for Western Judeo-Christian societies, between the desire for enlightenment, and the forbidden, choice and fault. Lene Bødker’s most recent work draws its inspiration from the story of The Fall, from the fundamentals that come from it and by which our contemporary societies are still deeply influenced. Far from a simple illustration of the story, the artist takes isolated elements and thematics which she treats as sculpture in order to give them the archetypal, metaphorical dimension that caracterizes her work. The human body is introduced explicitely next to the more abstract geometric and organic shapes, that used to prevail in her universe until now. A different nerve and a newly found fragility can be felt in these sculptures, which mark a turning point in her work.

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T R E M B L I N G   A N D   T R A N Q U I L I T Y
The Fall establishes disquiet in the human being – doubt, desire, guilt and fear. Without explicitly naming them, Lene Bødker refers to these notions in works such as I’m still alive and You’re still alive, with tree trunks in a state between growth and torsos with pruned branches. At home and embraced suggests security and love found at home in the shape of reliefs made of molding and floral and geometric ornaments from ancient frames. The art of framing becomes a symbol for refinement and a loving and peaceful shelter.
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N A T U R E    H U M A N    B E I N G  -  A L W A Y S
In Foot on the ground, the idea of Man as part of Nature, his anchoring and affiliation to it is evoked with a foot solidly planted, of which the extension is not a leg but a growth reminiscent of a cactus. Nursing and Gaia – two “infinite columns” made of symmetrically superimposed breasts – deals with the connection between the woman, a temptress with pointed breasts, the mystery of creation and its wondrous and constraining dimension as well as the inscribing of this reality in a never-ending repetition. References to art history – from archaic fertility goddesses to Brancusi – are obvious and widen the scope of the works.
The Morphosis series – three dense and dynamic tree trunks in muted and earthy colors penetrated and awoken by light – convey the advent of a shape and its evolution. The emerging or mutant shape is also explored in Could we be friends – a touching and hybrid “body” that creates numerous associations. Trust shows an open hand simultaneously suggesting availability, power and fragility. Is it the hand that offers the forbidden fruit? Maybe. In You did it, the snake is introduced in the shape of a “rising” spiral made of wide open interlacing from which light radiates. All the ambiguity of the mythical reptile – both tempter and key to forbidden yet attractive knowledge – is thus suggested.

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D O U B L E    N A T U R E
Well, a large container which surface is rhythmed by floral inspired elements seems to situate itself between nature and culture; its double affiliation is underlined by color, which, because of light variations, goes from Antique pink to light green. Water is a recurrent theme in the work of Lene Bødker, who likes to describe and bring life to that element. It can be seen as a symbol of renewal, transition from a state to another, metamorphosis as it can also recall Nature’s movement and rhythm (Waves).
Glass gives shape, it gives physical life. Through its capacity to carry light, it makes a connection between the material and immaterial – between the tangible and the spiritual. The dominating duality of the Western world, that is the long lasting “rule” of the separation of body and soul, finds a common ground here.
Glass is “dangerously” beautiful and partly out of our grasp because of its fluctuant aspect and its constant interaction with the environment. It seizes and unsettles us, in the same way as we often find ourselves in front of contradictions that we carry.

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b a c k g r o u n d

Lene Bødker (born in Denmark in 1958) is not unknown to the French public, as the Galerie Maria Lund has welcomed four exhibitions of her work since 2003. During the summer of 2016, the Maison Louis Carré (Bazoches-sur-Guyonne) dedicated a solo show to the artist. Her works are featured in numerous collections such as the V&A, London; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Musée-atelier du verre, Sars-Poteries ; Glasmuseum Hentrich – Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf ; Designcenter Ishigawa, Kanazawa, Glasmuseum Alter Hof Herding, Coesfeld-Lette ; Glasmuseet Ebeltoft and the Danish Arts Foundation, Denmark. In 1994, Lene Bødker’s work was the recipient of the Yutta Cuny-Franz Foundation, Honourable Award ; and in 2007 she received the Grand Prize, Kanazawa Glass Award. Since 2012, she has been one of the rare Danish artists to be awarded a lifelong grant by the Danish Arts Foundation.

]]> http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/bodker-maria-lund/feed/ 0 http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/didier-boussarie-maria-lund/ http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/didier-boussarie-maria-lund/#comments Sat, 25 Apr 2015 12:04:28 +0000 Galleries http://www.galleriesinparis.com/?p=3301 Who has never been fascinated by the beauty and extreme delicacy of a spider web?

Who has never experienced this moment where the marveling changes itself into ambiguous feelings as soon as the weaver appears, energetically walking on the threads of its fatal network…?

The web forms a microcosm where one finds all the world’s beauty and cruelty. The matter of this shelter-trap is most extraordinary; the spider’s silk is one of the most resistant threads there is. It devotes itself, exhausts itself to bring it out during long nights of labor: To exhaust oneself to live in silk… devouring in order to weave more and devour more. If spiders are often frightening, it is maybe mostly because the mirror they present to us is disturbing.

I N T O  T H E  W E B

Didier Boussarie devoted more than three years of work to spiders and their fabulous webs. He nurtured Tegenaria, allowing them to practice their “art”; feeding them, observing them, admiring their « radiant » compositions… He then recuperated their abandoned works of art to pursue the creation in his own way.

The webs have been stretched out in boxes, on frames – sometimes in juxtaposition with other relics from nature (rosebuds, branches, butterflies and mummified birds). They have served to cover up – as the finest of veils – photographs of diaphanous beautiful women. To create a series of frail landscape drawings, the artist darkened and densified the spiders’ silk with Indian ink.

Once nature’s lesson assimilated, Didier Boussarie brought out his weave – the kind in linen and cotton – to spin on with his paintbrushes points linked to lines that meet other points and lines. In an unconscious manner, he adopted the Tegenaria’s logic that secrete points linked by threads, that in turn are reunited by attachment points. The artist has entered the web to the point where his approach to the pictorial surface has been modified:

Thus, whereas the motives of his past works always kept their distances with the edge of the pictorial surface, these new paintings are completely covered by black networks. Sometimes, the background of the canvas remains white, intensely luminous, sometimes it is covered by discrete and vibrant colors that suggest a sky seen through the web, a few petals or a simple wall.

D E S I R E

But the artist’s intention remains the same: to render a beauty that he perceives whether it is where life is beating or where breathing has stopped. His desire to penetrate, possess and manipulate this woven matter forms a way to establish a thin link to the wonder we cannot fathom. Here, there is no theory, no “ism” and no time – there is all times and a very personal attempt to consecrate nature.

Peter Neuchs explores through his works the density of everyday life. The most insignificant scenes take on a spectacular dimension in his large-format photographs. His “stolen” snapshots made with a mobile phone seem to deliver enigmatic fragments of a story that is yet to be deciphered and his watercolors with latent symbolism transform the banal in a suspenseful narration.
Some topics are recurrent in Peter Neuchs’ work. First there are women: he paints them alone in their bathroom, has photographed and drawn naked body parts, series of stomachs, bosoms, legs; capturing them in moments of absence, in front of a window, with their child or diving in the water. There are also landscapes, sublime in the meaning the Romantics gave to the word- this “pleasing feeling of horror” in the face of the immensity and the power of nature or, on the contrary, in front of the fragility and fugacity of a snowdrop. And finally the mysterious interiors- private setting or places of worship- where shadow and light reveal and hide. The notion of memento mori is very present; the here and elsewhere meet and merge in this enigmatic work, that continuously escapes any defining… Peter Neuchs’ entire work is marked by a questioning of Man’s relationship to the spiritual, to time passing, to the precariousness of Man’s being, to Nature. But the artist’s answers remain suggestions that leave the spectator to his own interpretation.

« Brief Encounters »
In 1945, David Lean’s film Brief Encounter opens on a conversation scene at a station buffet. Whereas the camera explores the tables, a couple comes out of the ensemble: they are the principal characters who are living in this trivial scenery, the premises of a sentimental drama about to occur. Here one finds the power of the unsaid, of the suggestion, that characterizes Peter Neuchs’ work.
It is in the banality of places he goes to everyday or that he passes by while travelling that Peter Neuchs captures theses brief encounters where a breach opens up; these fleeting moments of lucidity where the beauty and the intensity of life emerge from the everyday life.
The exhibition brings together several novel series that the artist has made since 2001, when he moved to Brazil. The photographs show a naked female body on crumpled sheets, a wilted flower at the foot of a suffering Christ, a windswept beach, a swimmer in the night or an empty corridor. The artist captures these instants of intimate communion where the material takes on a spiritual dimension.
Peter Neuchs’ images offer us a duality where the banal is exceptional and the everyday life eternal. But there is too much noise, blur or obscurity for the meaning perceived by the artist to be revealed without ambiguity. There is no expression to interpret, nor an obvious symbol, but a veil that covers these body parts or landscapes. If Peter Neuchs is as close as possible to his topics, he keeps a distance, cuts and offers fragments of them- as if the beauty, the breath, the sensations themselves escaped in an attempt to seize them. The topics’ triviality tints itself with mystery and melancholia – the spectator almost becomes the voyeur of brief silent encounters where the photographer was touched to the core.

L A T E   N I G H T   O P E N I N G : Friday October 31st from 6pm till 9 pm within the tour of MOIS DE LA PHOTO 2014

O P E N I N G :Thursday November 6th from 6pm to 9pm

L E C T U R E : Tuesday November 25th at 7.30pm : « L’intimité en question » (Questioning intimacy) with the participation of Jean-Louis Pinte, curator, Mois de la photo 2014 – L’Institut suédois. Free admission, please book in advance: www.institutsuedois.fr