Galleries in Paris » Henrique Oliveira

ENRIQUE – VALLOIS

Galleries — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 09:21:33 +0000

HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA    Fissure

Through these tensions, Oliveira, undoubtedly makes visible the illusion that Nature is taking back its right. Triumphant, it destroys urbanity. Concrete yields and cracks up under the implacable evidence of its strength. Within this visible dynamics probably lies an underground dialectics where nature and culture meet, discuss and argue, through the prism, among others, of the organic and the built, of the animated and the inanimated. Oliveira still forces a certain idea of nature into an institutional universe. An abundant lattice which can just as much blend with what it comes across.

In his installation Baitogogo at the Palais de Tokyo, which displays a successful transplant with the building, Oliveira mingles exposed girders and imaginary tree trunks. A frontal collusion point to be read in-between nature and culture, but not as a sermon on an earth wounded by the presence of man. The artist rather seems to inscribe himself within a formal research on how man lays its hand on the world that surrounds him. Tapumes wood, fine wood slivers used for construction site fences in Brazil, could perhaps remind us how human beings model – sometimes clumsily – their territory and inhabit this earth they are the depository of.

It can happen that the «urban epidermis», words of the artist, grows in an anarchic manner. And cities implode under the weight. His three dimensional works or drawings on paper, made up of protuberances and growths, are perhaps an implicit portrait of the demographic context in which he grew up.

Poor materials also show how much Oliveira is mesmerised by construction and the elaboration of space. It is not surprising that the artist visited New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Everything in these devastated and worn out landscapes had to be rebuilt. A world to be created, a location where life had to be injected again. Therefore Henrique Oliveira went to gather mattresses, pillows, vestiges of a quiet domestic life, to pile them up in a deformed magma, of an explicit poverty. Condensation shows torn mattresses, as if eaten away by emptiness. Years after being pulled out of the slump, they still display open wounds, like residual and historical gaps.

Scraps objects , natural elements, deprivation of materials… his creations maintain a close relation with Arte Povera. Although the artist himself admits that the poor wood is close to the theoretical statement made by this movement, the use of recovered materials is more a way to force the boundaries of contemporary sculpture

and its relationship to space.

Henrique Oliveira invents oneiric forms infiltrated with life, in the same way a demiurge would bring to life, from the real and ex nihilo, a universe with fantasised contours.

                       Léa Chauvel-Lévy

LA DISTANCE JUSTE – GP&N VALLOIS

Galleries — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:36:12 +0000

LA DISTANCE JUSTE

Curator : ALBERTINE DE GALBERT

PILAR ALBARRACÍN (Spain) . GILLES BARBIER (France) . FREDI CASCO (Paraguay) MARINA DE CARO (Argentina) . MATÍAS DUVILLE (Argentina) . ANA GALLARDO (Argentina) JUAN FERNANDO HERRÁN (Colombia) . MARTIN KERSELS (USA). HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA (Brazil) PAULINA SILVA HAUYÓN (Chili) & WALTER ANDRADE (Argentina) . VIRGINIE YASSEF (France) Paulina Silva Hauyón & Walter Andrade Henrique Oliveira Matías Duville

“Try a little tenderness!” as the song goes, like an invitation to sink into the well-padded recesses of a grandmother’s old armchair. Tenderness is one of the strongest components of human nature. It is neither sentimentality nor mushiness, yet its suggestion alone often triggers excesses of modesty or cynicism, the intensity of which clearly indicates that it is an essential emotion that touches our innermost core. Often denigrated and considered as the prerogative of children, old people and women — in short the weak, tenderness is nevertheless a great source of resilience in the face of violence carried out against body and mind.

In a lecture entitled “The Hollow of the Palm and Infrared Love,” the psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Klein. offered a definition of the term by default: “Tenderness is neither possession, nor submission — which objectify — nor passion, nor addiction —which amputate and merge fractions of subjects.” According to him, the subtlety in tenderness resides in the “right distance,” very slight but not nil, which separates two free subjects connected to one another..

Articulated around the notion of the “right distance,” this exhibition questions our connection to the edge, physical limits and otherness. At times rubbed raw or overwhelmed, as when an image, gesture, or word become unhinged and invasive, this limit shifts, whether one is the victim or the author of this shift.

It is the crossing of that tenuous limit between tenderness and the obscene that is at work in Spanish artist Pilar Albarracín’s video La Cabra, in which the artist dances with a goatskin sack of wine that slowly colors her folk costume blood red.

The embrace and the separation of bodies are also the subjects of the Californian artist Martin Kersels’ photographs entitled Tossing a Friend, which literally illustrates a brutal distancing of the artist’s body and the body of Melinda, his ex-partner. Conversely, with Posición Horizontal, a work by Colombian artist Juan Fernando Herrán, the other is not distanced but rather contained, assimilated. The series of nesting beds, each one fitting into another like Matryoshka dolls, suggests a mise en abîme of childhood or one’s innermost world, as if they were being placed in a sheltered spot.

Tenderness as protection and consolation runs throughout the work of the Argentinean artist Matías Duville. Coming straight out of his large-format drawings of unreal landscapes, a giant fish hook —of rusted metal and the size of a person —is gently resting on a blanket that brings to mind the same kinds of blankets found lying around in old houses, the simple sight of which is comforting.

Finally videos by Ana Gallardo (Estela) and Virginie Yassef (L’Arbre, in collaboration with Julien Prévieux), along with several other video works, illustrate the fragile space tenderness embodies, between movement and immobility, silence and crying out.

Albertine de Galbert

. Director of Inecat (Institut national d’expression, de création, d’art et de thérapie [National Institute of expression, creation, art and therapy]).

. Patrice van Eersel, “Une soudaine irruption de la tendresse ?” in Le Grand Livre de la Tendresse (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), p. 23.

Galerie GP&N Vallois – Paris 6

Galleries — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:43:22 +0000

Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois Gallery opened its doors in 1990 at the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Contemporary Art/Nouveau Réalisme duality has always been one of the main characteristics of the gallery. The idea that a galerist can do the same work for a young emerging artist as for an accomplished one has always been central in our approach. Since our opening, we have exhibited the following artists : Boris Achour, Pilar Albarracin, Gilles Barbier, Julien Berthier, Julien Bismuth, Mike Bouchet, Alain Bublex, Massimo Furlan, Taro Izumi, Richard Jackson, Adam Janes, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Martin Kersels,Paul Mc Carthy, Jeff Mills, Joachim Mogarra, Arnold Odermatt,Henrique Oliveira, Pierre Seinturier, Keith Tyson, Jacques Villeglé, Olav Westphalen, Winshluss, Virginie Yassef. This approach is still ours today with exhibitions of the estates of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, as well as a personal exhibition dedicated to younger artists, such as Henrique Olivieira, a young Brasilian artist who created a buzz at the last Sao Paulo Biennale