Galleries in Paris » GUTHARC

SCHMID – GUTHARC

Galleries — Fri, 18 Apr 2014 13:34:08 +0000

“More printed matter”, Joachim Schmid
Alain Gutharc and the German artist Joachim Schmid, who claims to be a “picture recycler”, have been collaborating since 1995.
The passion of the artist for picture seeking and their assembly gives his work an endless goal, given the thousands of pictures which invade us every day. According to him, their frightening profusion justifies the uselessness of creating new ones. He collects and regroups them into series. They are thus re-vitalized for artistic purposes. Ways of collecting varies: pictures found randomly in the street during strolls, recycled negatives, numeric picture available online with search engines, pictures posted in the press or for advertising purposes… The origin of its pictures is as diverse as the multiple sources which flood us with visuals.
This exhibition, 6th presentation of the artist’s works in the gallery, gathers 2 unseen series.
The “Bilderbuc” series, started in 2011, is a collection of pictures which were initially printed. They are shown without their context and without any comment. Their juxtaposition outside from any explanation questions our relationship to the meaning of what is in front of us. They are not used in order to illustrate an idea, they do not guide us throughout our understanding, they are not able to influence us into an interpretation that could be wrong or misleading. They no longer have a function and appear as they actually are: beautiful, abstract, incongruous, intriguing, confusing, unpleasant… But they also trigger in us the need to give a meaning, to find why, to find how, to find something that could justify their existence.
The “Estrelas amadas – beloved stars”, 2013, takes black and white pictures of movie stars reproduced in a Portuguese magazine in the 1950s. The former owner of the magazine, a young Lisbon woman probably, had coloured the lips of all the
beloved stars with the brightest red, not longer after acquiring the magazine. Decades later, this copy landed on a flea market where the artist in turn acquired it. By selecting this series of photographs, Joachim Schmid recycles these pictures, from the press and reproduced into thousands of copies, made unique and anecdotal by the bright red of the actresses’
lips. Joachim Schmid is interested in photography without practicing it. He questions himself and us about the avalanche of visual information in which we are immersed without even being aware. He raises the question of the multiple and the unique, the meaning and its distortion, by its collecting and gathering into series of pictures from multiple origins.

DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURES – GUTHARC

Galleries — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:21:51 +0000

Domestic architectures
Helen von Boch, Fernando et Humberto Campana, Pierre Charpin, Véronique Ellena, Konstantin Grcic, Enzo Mari, Philippe Million, Jasper Morrison, Serge Mouille, Charlotte Perriand, Jean Prouvé, Bernard Quesniaux, André Sornay, Ettore Sottsass, Vincent J. Stoker, Martin Szekely, Franz West, Frank Willems
These domestic architectures, objects, furnitures, lights are the things that make up our daily environment. They are the result of acute reflexions that atempt to renew the formal vocabulary of ti concieve a diffrent relationship between the object and its fonction.
These objetcs were or are destined, sometimes, for institutions or for the office. Their industrialized fabrication processes and the inherent need for solidity often are intrinsic components of thier conception. They were or are designed to be able to be widely diffused among the public.
The object is a product. it is subject to all of the contingencies of commercialisation – powerful corporations or more modest brands are strategic and commercial supports of production and distribution. These groups are marks that are based on anterioriety of thier creators to communicate and attract attention. But their dynamic force allows these creations a diffusion and eventual recognation normally unavailable to these most intimate creations destined for the elitist and precious circuit of the world of design galleries and art galleries.
The Mark and the strenght of it presence gives value to the object. Ultimatly, it is amosmosis for the same purposes : recognition, visibility, profitibility (in terms of image and economic resources). The designers synthesize the reflexions resulting from the most experimental work to concieve these products meant for a larger public. Here we find their conceptual signature. Thus the products fulfil their destiny. Sometimes they know great success sometimes they remain unknown because the demands of their production can create a cost preventing competitive commercialisation. Sometimes also the originality of the approach is not percieved by a large public and the buyers remain those who frequent art galleries who are too few for the objects to remain in production long.
Times does its work and the recognition gives these productions an exceptional character, a rarity. These objects become iconic.
The speculative fever burns. Then they are reissued so that a large public may have access to them.
The exhibition examines objects of iconic status and others recently created and currently available. The first were, before all else, objects destined for mass distribution.
The intelligence which prevailed at their conception allows us to see with clarity a value which few perceived when they were created.
The objects currently on the market are all designed by strong identities in the XXI century design world.
They are sometimes very modest, sometimes more expensive, but never issued in limited editions. We bet the near future will reveal the importance of these objects and we are confident today that tomorrow we would regret not having looked more closely.

JANOT – GUTHARC

Galleries — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 10:25:14 +0000

“Concrete / Buildings” is the fourth personal exhibition from Guillaume Janot at the Gallery Alain Gutharc. The exhibition at the gallery associates 2 ensembles of images : “Buildings”, series of photography realised since 2007 and “Concrete”, a series of photography realised in 2011.
This exhibition continues from and complements the previous exhibition “Just like heaven” at the gallery “voies off” in Arles and at the photography center in Lectoure in 2011 and 2012.
“Builgings” series as an inventory that the artist has compiled over the last several years in Pékin. It examines photography of residential “Buildings” constructed starting in the 1960’s, mass architecture based on soviet models, sometimes renovated but increasingly destined for destruction, in favor of vast more functional complexes intended for the new emerging middle class.
The series “Concrete” is comprised of photographs of concrete trees found in a park in Pékin. The tittle of the series in English is a play on words based on the double meaning of “concrete” refering to the material itself and the quality of tangibility. The subject, theese great molded truncks, themselves rooted in the surrounding vegetation, help to create through the mimetic effect, through the photographic process and the separation suggested between the subject and its representation, the trouble and the ambiguity facing the images.
These two series complete the work that the artist has realised since 2006 through a collection of photographs titled “Ecostream” (displayed notably during a personal exhibition at the Ricard Foundation in 2009) taken in amusement parks, themas parks, or botanical gardens at the four corners of the globe.
The theme is the fundamental paradox of the representation of reality through photography : where are the real and the false situated in a society no longer as spectacle but as permanent representation ? How can we examine through the immaterial images of photographs, the reality that they intend to display ? How can we simply show the most extra-ordinary reality ?

MOLINERO – GUTHARC

Galleries — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 08:37:23 +0000

“La fiancée du pirate” is Anita Molinero’s third exhibition at Galerie Alain Gutharc.
As usual, Anita Molinero presents us works of recycled materals, but also, and perhaps more importantly, she applies actions outside at the repertoire of techniques that have talsely come to identify herstyle (that of blow torches on a trash bin). To cut, to lay, to link – these “ordinary” actions are the origin of her art and its evolution.
In 1995, she made sculptures from McDonalds boxes (Untitled, 1995, collection La Piscine, Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, Roubaix).
This idea come to her during walks in the city, where “her eyes were killed looking around her” and seeing boxes flattered in the street or flying “completely vulnerable”.
She decide to work with this material to do different and new sculptures in relation to those made at the time. Archaic and organic sculptures hang limply on assembled exhaust pipes. The artist speaks of “an unjustifiable compulsion of association”, made from garbage materials and / or materials from the plastics industry. About this work she says that it is a punk sculpture and this work punk is certainly right to define the relationship of the artist to the cultural world.
On a wall hangs a work made from car headlights burned in a ceramic oven. This combustion reveals a material rich in shades of color, and changes the textural appearance. Anita Molinero’s sculpture is baroque but this comes from the accidents and blasts, from scratching and stretching. This is explosive
sculpture. The title of the exhibition refers to Nelly Kaplan eponymous film, released in 1969. She said this is “the story of a modern day witch,
who is not burned by Inquisitors because it is she who burns them”. Would Anita be this “fiancée du pirate” armed with a flamethrower and would she reveal her deepest nature ?

At the same time, the estate of Pommery, Reims, appointed Bernard Blistène as curator of the exhibition “Pommery : 10 years of experience”. He presents in this exhibition of ten artists, an expressive suspension by Anita Molinero which measures more than 15 meters in one of the cellars chimneys. This event, wich begins october 4, 2012 will continue until october 2013. In the context of the “Cycle l’Eternel Détour” in the autumn winter 2012 – 2013, from october 17, 2012 until january 20, 2013, Anita Molinero presents an exhibition entitled “Prequel” at MAMCO, in Geneva.

Stoker Vincent.J – Gutharc

Galleries — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:18:25 +0000

Heterotopia is a fall. Architects frustrate nature by creating ascending shapes. Nature, on the contrary, tends to flatten everything. This series shows this eternal struggle that even monuments end up losing. The history of these places is the history of our crises and the history of the failure of utopian projects. These ruins reveal the dark hidden parts and cast doubts on autophagous systems that let destroy what they have built themselves. My work focuses on those mistakes and the forgotten losers of history. I give voice to those that are often ignored or neglected. Heterotopia is a testimony to today’s small ones, former monuments supporting great expectations. It also shows what would happen if mankind disappeared from the planet. Nature would reassert itself and reclaim its rights. Our civilization would be forgotten almost instantly, covered up with moss.
But Heterotopia is also a rise. It is the birth of a new order, the harmony of nature and culture. These places have never been as beautiful as today, in decay. Physics makes art and magnifies architecture. My photography praises the slow and meticulous work of time, the inspired worker. These stout and monumental monsters, relics of the past, murmur lessons to our ears. I hear them shout the brevity and fragility of our existence. They have an edification power. Could it be possible to imagine vanity and the “memento mori” in a more powerful way than the monument to ruin? Additionally, one may see in them an opportunity to make peace with our past. Humanity makes mistakes and people must be reminded of that. These terrible mutilations, we will end up liking them.
Behind the dust, the rust and under the rubble, we can sense the architects’ original visions of order and the rigid geometry of the buildings. The shots are framed with an almost mathematic exigency and show decrepit textures, all to try and make the viewer discern the conflict in these places that are falling into chaos and rising with meaning.
Vincent J. Stoker