What constitutes an American landscape? The phrase conjures wide-open spaces, iconic natural wonders and wholesome heartland towns across the USA. One might think of Thomas Cole’s Hudson River School paintings, Ansel Adams’s photographs, John Ford’s Westerns, or even advertisements for Marlboro cigarettes and GMC trucks…
A Sylvester Stallone action movie from the 1980s, maybe not. However, as Alain Bublex demonstrates with An American Landscape, the backdrop for the original John Rambo movie (First Blood, 1982) is indeed a reflection, celebration and perpetuation of a particular vision of America’s landscapes — one that is heavily informed by art history.

Extract from Mara Hoberman’s text for the press release

Brittany, 1940 – date written on a document found more than ten years ago by the artist, after the death of an old aunt, alongside a 1925 Kodak box filled with negatives. It sounds like the beginning of an old black and white film. It’s a family story, marked by lies and things left unsaid, with a quisling grandfather as the main character. […] The artist may have erased part of his archives; these images nevertheless make it possible to fill in a “memory hole”, to dig beyond a family archaeology, a passage through a national and collective History that is still punctuated by the unsaid. Erwan Venn’s headless and bodiless characters are the ghosts of a collective memory that is still too often fading. […].

Extract from Agate Bortolussi’s text for the press release

The Heart of the matter

Warsaw to Paris. It would be a one-way ticket for Emanuel Proweller, my father, to Gare de l’Est, where he arrived, stateless, with no belongings, with his wife and child. The war deprived him of his youth, stole his identity and reduced his world and family to ashes. [...] Having overcome innumerable obstacles, he explained that “vitality is made in such a way that you immediately embrace the colours of your new soil.”

[...] When Proweller painted, he invited all his senses along to sing “The colour of the seasons”. He never ceased to express his gratitude to life. There was no art without spirituality. He painted like others pray. Each brushstroke celebrated his unwavering belief in humanity. Whether it was abstract or figurative, any object, however modest, was worthy of being looked at and magnifi ed, given symbolic status. Whether it was a bottle, a coffee grinder or a candlestick, they were all part of his personal “mythologie quotidienne”, before its time. Colour was his credo, whereas his contemporaries were sounding the death knell for painting and creating installations.

[...] After the hell that was the Holocaust, Proweller regained his place as the subject and was no longer the object of persecution. However, it was through painting that he acquired in his own eyes his legitimacy as a survivor, with this “I” that acts as the subject of the verb to paint. “Me, Proweller, painter”. He was the main subject.

He also claimed the right to the pictorial subject. In 1948, a newly arrived refugee from Poland, he painted the “Bâton de Moïse”. Renamed “La Canne” at his first exhibition for Colette Allendy, this walking stick guided him, as did his humanist faith, through arid journeys across the desert, leading him to his Promised Land, a new form of figuration.

[...] Proweller came through the black and white. For him, the “black spot” at the end of the line was the beginning of the route towards figuration and colour beyond geometric abstraction. In this way he managed to rehumanise the world.

[...] As a dead painter, he has the benefit of another life and continues to live on in his works. While they were painted in the last century, they still speak, and more and more so, to men and women today. At each retrospective or exhibition, his work surprises with its vitality, freshness and relevance. And this miracle will happily occur once again within the walls of the Galerie Vallois.

When [Emanuel Proweller] was finishing a painting, stood in front of his easel, it was only finished when he finally murmured: “It is breathing.”

Elisabeth Brami-Proweller,
excerpts from the exhibition catalogue
published at Éditions Courtes et Longues

You have travelled through a mirror, to the other side of things. Yet, not somewhere else. See, not everything is unknown and some fi gures are even familiar. Expect to feel things that were once shapeless. Lucie Picandet has created them, alone, last Spring, while time had stopped. In her paintings we see worlds blossoming under bell-jars; among them, hybrid beings that seem to be the result of a union between two species, suspended clothing inhabited by absent bodies, interference and most probably some inconsistencies. The fi rst of them is perhaps that Lucie Picandet wants to represent what cannot be represented while accepting to mourn the visible.

The artist explores this paradox through two enigmatic experiences. First, she is interested in esoterism that plunges the people who are confronted with it into interstitial worlds that science still struggles to explain. During these periods of time, their senses greatly increase. Their emotions take shape, they let themselves be touched before escaping as reason returns to them. Then the artist discovers the Tibetan Book of the Dead which describes the path of physically dead beings: forty-seven days during which their consciousness tries to pass through various stages in the hope of reaching Nirvana. It is then a question of fluidifying one’s vision of the world in order to extricate oneself from the cycle of reincarnations, to abandon all judgments and with it, a part of oneself.

Lucie Picandet is a painter, but in the end her gaze never ceases to rest on what cannot be seen. While she studied theology, the question of the materiality of belief already animated her. When she moved to the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, the artist developed a richer inner life, giving rise to a new passion for mystical experiences and their stories.

Today, she wants, even more, to materialize feelings and abstractions. Her paintings have thus become open doors to those mental spaces in which worlds in gestation in bubbles are topped by hybrid beasts with ambitions that are too little clear. They demand a refl exive plasticity but are also refuges for those who suffer from solitude. Lucie Picandet plays with codes and semantic. She can be inspired by orthodox icons or by the agents of contemporary imagination that are the influencers of social networks. Here, the contours of the invisible are shaped as if it were a palpable object and things once tangible slide at will from one form to another. The boundaries between the real and the immaterial, the rational and the mystical are challenged, laid down on canvas and diluted in the oil that the artist uses for the first time in her work. So much so that it seems that Lucie Picandet sees through worlds.

I have a project, Retroactive Interference born of this strange feeling, shared by many of us, of being in a movie. This unique moment that we are living has transformed our vision of the world, or rather has blurred it. Fiction and reality seem to merge to become what you might be called “realiction.” So, I am going back to my roots of my first great artistic traumas. I want to talk about the films that marked me as a child and teenager. It’s not just about masterpieces – some are even proven z-grade series. But these films are at the origin of my universe, of my psyche… Their common denominator? They are genre movies. Horror, violence, action, science fiction, apocalypse… to sum up quickly.My childish spirit still untouched by references, ingested everything with a limitless appetite. Later, of course, I evolved in my tastes, but I never forgot that primitive joy felt in the darkness of a movie theater or in front of an often-viewed videotape.I have kept intact in me the energy of revelation; it serves as fuel for me.

I will make, in my own manner, the posters of the films that have shaped me but also of films invented or dreamed up. I want to confuse reality and fiction.Our daily lives have turned into the extraordinary long before this global pandemic. Whether we take the attacks of September 11, Fukushima, the mass exodus of migrants… Everything is to underline the ambiguity of a world that scripts its own collapse in a mixture of amazement and dread. Drawing, color, catchy phrases, exuberance: that’s what the form is all about. Again, I need the primitive impulse of joyful creation.When I adapted Pinocchio into a comic strip (the first animated film I saw as a kid at the cinema and which traumatized me… once more!), I had in mind to talk about globalization.

If I have hijacked a myth of popular culture, it is to give my vision of an ultra-liberal world adrift. It’s an almost unconscious process that is found throughout my work. I have a rather dark vision of our society and I feel the need to counterbalance it with a playful even grotesque form.Irony and melancholy are very good friends, as we know.The films I am going to illustrate are about a world that is collapsing. Whether it’s an invasion of the living dead, a natural disaster, a nuclear explosion, a pandemic… Yet this story, we already know. This film we have seen before.And these films about ecological disasters, or about the ends of the nuclear world, how many have we seen? Dozens, hundreds… Some will say that reality goes beyond fiction. For my part, I would say that it is fiction that takes the place of reality. The ultra-liberal world predicts its loss constantly and, better yet, seems to want to accelerate it based on previously written scenarios. The prophecy is stated; all that is left to do is to fulfill it as a good student does. Is the World aware of creating its own destruction? Why this relentlessness to produce chaos? One may find an answer in turning 2000 years back. Western culture is rooted in Judeo-Christian ideology. The foundations of the Christian religion are based on the idea of the end of times, of the apocalypse. Jesus said: “the end of times is coming soon, get ready! “

Gilles Barbier’s art is simultaneously a word on the tip of the tongue, an idea at the back of the mind, and a chiaroscuro between two intervals of light. There is no “window on the world”, a metaphor applied to painting ever since Alberti forgot to close his; with Barbier there is a skylight in a cosmos as singular as it is infinite, a thought that leads to a system, as extraordinary as it is abundant, for re-enchanting the world.

For his 12th solo show at the gallery, Barbier has created a series of drawings, the titles of which start with prepositions – Between, inside, behind, under, on… – that are making the (art) world think in every direction.
Born in Vanuatu (Oceania, South Pacific), the artist has always been fascinated by the sand drawings; these drawings take shape while a story is told, and are a form of writing that can be read in any direction. A “preposition” is a word that serves as a tool that syntactically links a word with the one preceding it, in a subordinating relationship. Position matters, explains Barbier. Between, inside, behind, under, on… These prepositions are all movements Barbier makes around subject matter buried within a complex system; like a wave that churns everything in a ceaseless flow, a maelstrom.

Zhenya Machneva wants to maintain a part of improvisation within a laborious manual process. “I hope that you can feel my energy through the works.” The choice of tapestry is physical. Zhenya Machneva gives the technique an organic dimension to which it is intimately attached. Sitting in front of the loom, the artist tirelessly repeats the same gestures to generate successive frames. Repetition, slowness and loneliness are part of a meditative state in which each cotton thread becomes a mantra. A gestural repetition that echoes that once applied by workers, active in these factories that today are ghosts. The choice of tapestry is also political. If you look at the history of art, tapestry is a medium.

It has an authoritarian, timeless, sensory aspect. Through the thread and the loom, Zhenya Machneva represents the Soviet industrial heritage that has become invisible and unproductive. The motifs, machines and buildings are the archives of a bygone era, a time when industrialization and the figure of the worker were over-glorified. A vanished era of which barely visible ghosts remain. It is then for the artist to embody this heritage to give it a new existence.The making of tapestries is a physical incarnation, but also metaphorical. She pays particular attention to patterns, or to the details of machines whose zoomorphism or anthropomorphism she accentuates. She then plays with the pareidolia, which brings out familiar faces, skulls and other forms.The artist thus engages a new reading of the woven motifs by opening a fictional space. Through her weft threads and her chain threads, Zhenya Machneva awakens ghosts, revives and makes the poetry of sleeping landscapes palpable.

Julie Crenn

Pilar Albarracín’s new exhibition in Paris is based on a critical and political exploration of the Semana Santa («Holy Week») in Seville. For a week in April, the whole city lives to the rhythm of plural and thematic processions. About sixty fraternities commemorate the Passion of Christ by carrying pasos, richly decorated floats on which are placed extremely heavy sculptures. According to long and precise routes, the men carry the pasos at arm’s length to reach the cathedral of Seville and do penance. In absolute silence or, on the contrary, in musical effervescence, hundreds or even thousands of men move painfully towards the same geographical point. Pilar Albarracín then questions these spectacularly painful processions during which bodies are tested by beliefs, the weight of morality and respect for traditions. The new works are more tinged with violence and solemnity than with humor and irony. She proceeds in this way by blasphemous gestures to make palpable an oppression and suffocation generated by ideologies and the idea of a Spanish identity. The artist relies on the codes of Baroque art to dramatize gestures, emotions, postures and objects.

Albarracín plays with the highly theatrical dimension of religious rituals to create images with powerful symbolic power. She holds a mirror to the violence inherent in the authoritarian systems against which she struggles. The title of the exhibition contains an order, then a request: no apagues mi fuego, dejame arder, «don’t put out my fire, let me burn». The fire that must not be extinguished by the other is that of her commitment, her convictions, her history, her body. She asks that the other let her burn, in hell as is implied, if that is her choice. Individual choice is at the heart of the artist’s plastic and critical reflection. During the 1970s, feminist activists advocated, and still advocate today: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. By taking up the codes and decorum of the dominant ideologies, Pilar Albarracín fights against the guidelines, taboos, morals and prohibitions that regulate and shape bodies. Through her work, she continues to demand the fundamental right to self-determination.

Julie Crenn

[...] Far from being simply contemporary, [Robert Cottingham’s] motifs evoke the world before World War 2, the world of his childhood, as well as many a nod to modern art and its commonplaces – the relation between the image and the photograph, between the word and painting, being one of the great modernist questions. To go beyond the subject and reach painting, including abstract painting, via photography, is a complex way of doing things,and one that he accepted more clearly than other painters in the same “movement.” His approach, which is at once conceptual and photographic, allows room for content that is much more literary and human than at first appears. In his painting we can see as much abstraction as we can representation.» – Camille Morineau

Galerie Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois presents for the first time the work of the Hyperrealist American artist Robert Cottingham. After the exhibition in June 2018 of John DeAndrea, the gallery continues the exploration of this movement born in USA in the early 1970s.The exhibition «Fictions in the space between» covers all of his career. At 36 rue de Seine a set of oil paintings (dated between 1991 and 2019) accompanied by their studies will be on display. In our second space will be presented a retrospective of his works on paper; from the Hollywood Villas of 1969 to his recent Perfume bottles which testify to the richness of this Hyperrealist work. We also exhibit the signs that made him famous, the trains, the typewriters, the cameras or the mechanical components.

Throughout the 70s, Jean Tinguely continues to challenge artistic expectations. He demonstrates his ability to surprise again and again the art world and the public. His works are comical, inventive, rebellious but above all fun, encouraging everyone to smile and laugh.
His artistic gestures are both ridiculous and breathtaking in their inventiveness and spirit. In contrast to the seriousness that began to envelop the contemporary art of that time, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and their colleagues are distinguished by their attachment to parody, sharing the same passion for the show, the monumental and the subversive.

Tinguely’s work in the 1970s seems to be particularly focused on keeping the Dada spirit alive. As a neo-Dadaist, Tinguely reproduces one of Duchamp’s most famous gestures: stripping a tool of its utility and transforming it into something else, as evidenced by the work Hommage à Dada-Max (1974), a light sculpture involving four feathers – red, blue, yellow and green – attached to an electric hedge trimmer motor. Tinguely combines objects with do-it-yourself tools – drills, wrenches, hammers, saws – placing scrap metal sculptures on pedestals, imitating high-art in a constant back-and-forth between functionality and art, the frivolous movements exacerbating the joke. In Miostar No.1, Sans Titre and Bosch No.1, Tinguely combines a drill and a rotating wheel in a variety of configurations. When the drills begin to work, they trigger an absurd, ultimately unnecessary and repetitive rotation of the wheel to which they are attached. This clumsy but amusing process indicates the extreme obsolescence of the mechanical object. Exhibited together, these works offer a cacophony of sounds and movements like an exceptional range of colors.

Throughout his career, Tinguely’s experimental work oscillates between life and art. In this perspective Tinguely creates a series of lamps more directly related to real life, animating the public space by movement, color and light.
Sophisticated or theatrical in their presentation, Tinguely’s lamps from the 70s borrowed their aesthetics from its first small sculptures-machines, combining a variety of metal parts with colored bulbs.
Lampe Théière (1972), for example, imitates the shape of a tree branch transformed into a standing lamp. The metal structure becomes the support of an eclectic combination of absurd objects, including a teapot, feathers, a white metal shade. The seven bulbs of different colors at the top of the artwork offer rainbow-like lighting. A joyous and chromatic work, representative of the humor, the subversive
mischievousness and the electric energy of this radically inventive artist.

«Bricolages et Débri(s)collages» refers to the title of the exhibition «Débricollages», a wordplay combining debris, oddities and collages, that the Bischofberger Gallery in Zurich dedicated to Tinguely in 1974. It presents more than a dozen works never shown in France. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog richly illustrated and prefaced by Kyla McDonald, curator of the recent and magnificent retrospective of Niki de Saint Phalle at the Beaux-Arts in Mons.