Galleries in Paris » In Situ

GENADRY – IN SITU

Galleries — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:13:39 +0000

« If Daniele Genadry’s paintings provoke silence and induce contemplation, it’s because they have something to do with stories of angels insofar as they are apparitional paintings. As apparitional paintings they are points of encounter between two dimensions: that of the pictorial space and the real space, the depicted space we see in the painting and the real space from which we see the painting. Genadry’s means to create the fusion between the pictorial and the real space consist in making the light that seems to emanate from the painting, belonging to pictorial space, and the ambient light that illuminates the painting, belonging to real space, indistinguishable. A new way of treating light is introduced: we are no longer faced with a light that would be caught in the pictorial space, like that of Giotto for instance, where the light in the painting is clearly distinct from the light that illuminates the painting, a classical light that accompanies a conception of painting as an opening onto another world; nor are we faced with an ambient light that would merely sweep across the surface of the painting, illuminating it so that we can grasp the various elements that structure its composition, as in the paintings of Manet or Klee. The white, thinly pigmented areas, where we can almost see the naked canvas, reflect the ambient light of the room while, at the same time, capturing this light in a motif – that of a mountain, a glittering sea, a valley. The figurative motif is crucial to capture the ambient light in another world, the represented world. The fact remains that it is a very real light that we see as emanating from an imaginary world. The painted motif is thus, in a way, always painted on the edge, even when it occupies the center of the picture; painted on the edge precisely because it is only one component of this visual machine that aims at creating a point of indistinguishability between the ambient light and the pictorial light, the motif receding to free up this white area where the two lights merge. And so the background of the painting meets the luminous background, and Genadry’s paintings seem to emit the light of the room in which we find ourselves. This luminous emanation carries in its turn the motif that seems to take shape in front of our gaze, in front of the eye that contemplates, that is caught in the silence of the apparition. Faced with this light, the eye dilates, and patiently begins to see, becoming accustomed to this new light: details, a stone, a blade of grass, form before our eye, slowly rising up from the white background. In this way, Genadry’s paintings bring the motif as a whole into being in front of the viewer’s gaze. Angels, too, gradually take shape before our gaze. It is in this sense, that these paintings mobilize a frontal gaze, a gaze that stares at a distant point on the white surface and sees the various landscapes come forth, like emanations – it is not customary to paint an angel in three-quarter view, the height of profanation. Whereas modern painting was defined by a mobile eye, flatness, composition and ambient light – elements that were at the service of the act of reading the painting – Genadry’s apparitional painting presents a new constellation: the eye is fixed, the flat surface infinitely deep, the light a fusion of two lights, the embodied eye dilates and through the movement of the flesh gains access to vision. Apparitions seem to have incarnation as their counterpart. Genadry’s various paintings, suspended in the same room, define a luminous volume, a fragment of day. Light on light. »

Excerpt from the exhibition text, Fares Chalabi, september 2024

HAERIZADEH – IN SITU

Galleries — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 12:03:34 +0000

The Beautiful Decay of Flowers in The Vase by Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian offer a compositionist view of the world, one that can be seen, felt and danced.
The Alluvium made from metal rods and carefully painted floating discs, twist into multiple positions. Recently presented in Venice during the 2022 biennial, they frame fragments of our contemporary history and tiny captions: “burning ship Sri-Lanka” interspersed with more hopeful visions “fog, stars, a zoom out from the chaos of human everyday life”…
The gestures of transposing and reframing these elements from the news cut within the seamless fabric of the obesity of images that flood our daily worlds. But the sculptures are also humanoid beasts, arboring what could be seen as four legs and three heads. Their kaleidoscopic visions force the viewer to move, physically and beyond a familiar zone to be richly rewarded with ornamentations that often bear citations, that envelop. When in the form of tables and chairs they support and entrance the viewer.
The news and citations contaminate and are produced by humans or forces of nature. Considered from an interspecies perspective, a multiplicity of references, and irreconcilable scales cohabitate. Within the canvases of Madame Tussauds (Her Majesty) series, the several-legged characters of the Alluvium seem to return in various forms of procession, this time with animal features and in civilized garb.
As Emmanuele Coccia points out in Métamorphoses, 2021, the unity of a human species is already a myth as we are populated and formed by millions of other micro-cellular beings, some millions years old in a field of coexistence where the past the present and the future mingle. Particles of the dead and the living cohabitate. As complex life forms we are all trans species.1
The almost molecular structures of the Alluvium are born from a choreography of form: the dance of the artists as they are explaining vectors and movements to their fabricator, Mohammed Rahis Mollah, who is credited within the piece. Emancipated from a given language, the sculptures can also be read as scores. The artist Kiori Kawai was invited to devise a dance structure from the Alluvium transposed into the salt lakes within the Gulf region. Different levels of contribution multiply through each stage of collaborations while making a breach in a Western-centered system of references. Iranian Artists living in the UAE, communicate with a Bangladeshi fabricator and inspire the new work of a Japanese dancer in a feedback loop. The dialogues and exchanges create flow with a work generating another.(…)

Texte by Sarina Basta

DAMMANN – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:08:11 +0000

For over 10 years I have been searching for primeval mammals in the Oligocene sediments of Wyoming. Few things have touched me as much as those summer weeks each year. But for a long time I could not integrate fossils directly into my artistic work. This despite the fact that fossils are in many ways very similar to paintings,
and despite the fact that I believe I seek out fossils for the same motivations that led me to become an artist. I have tried and tried. It has never worked. If you take
a human skull, you have a metaphor; death, transience, fears; all kinds of meanings present themselves. But the skull of a primeval horse? It remains what it is: the
skull of a primeval horse.
The sediments I am searching in were deposited about 35 million years ago during the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene. What was then a forested, moist
habitat with mild temperatures is now an extremely hot and dry landscape. You hike through canyons that crisscross the land, looking for the slightly lighter white of
fossilized bones and skulls peeking out from the walls. It’s hard work to bring them to light. Searching, finding and preparing fossils is a lot like making a painting.
Then came the pandemic. For two years, I could not come to the United States. I looked at the many thousands of photos from Wyoming. Over and over again. In the
second year, I began to translate my longing into work. I was looking for some kind of essence of my experiences there. I wanted to translate the imagery of fossils
into the structure of watercolors. Fossils are often flattened. Like a painting. Or spatial like a sculpture. They deposit randomly, but that randomness leads to en-
viably good compositions. Parts can disintegrate, be displaced, distorted, cut off.
A fossil is the trace of the last moments of a living being. A trace that can be read. Like a picture. I painted and drew my photos of looking for fossils as if they
were settling into a sediment. As if my memories were being embedded. But it is not about telling stories. Pictures do not tell stories. They show moments.
What does it mean to dig into the ground? Into the texture of a place, its history?
One might think that this is mainly changing the place. But the holes I dig disappear in 1, 2 years. Quite different from the touch that searching has left in me.
Martin Dammann

DEROUBAIX – IN SITU

Galleries — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 16:44:27 +0000

If Damien Deroubaix is above all a painter, he also creates installations, sculptures and engraved wood, whose relationship is attested by the exhibition organised in 2020 by the In Situ gallery. In his pictorial works, he combines, as Rauschenberg masterfully did in his time, different iconic and formal registers, with painting-matter-colour coming into dialogue with black and white prints. This principle notably allows him to explore the play of repetitions and variations that underlies his plastic thinking, giving rise to constantly reinvented associations.

STOP – IN SITU

Galleries — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:42:19 +0000

Stop, let’s stop in this new venue, in this unusual environment. Let’s take the time to explore each floor of the space, from the basement to the terrace, to discover, through an itinerary of works by the gallery’s artists, this new destination of Grand Paris. The periphery questions, it opens new territories. Our urban habits dialogue with an industrial and rural history. Time may seem suspended, far from the frenzy of central Paris.
Stop is also a reflection on the need to give oneself time: reflection, the relationship with others, to the other, to what is different, to reflect on the state of the social world and that of our planet, to equally reread our history?

Komunuma (community or common in Esperanto) brings together, on the same site, several independent public or private entities, connected by contemporary art. The diversity of activities will generate collaborations and discussions, by providing a broad opening onto the world of French and international contemporary plastic creation. We would like the multiplicity of the proposals, on this enormous site, to encourage our public to spend time in it.
To inaugurate this new space, In Situ has decided to show most of the gallery’s artists in order to share with them the discovery of this venue that they will invest in the near future.
In the basement, Gary Hill presents the sound installation ?Up Against Down,? 2008.
The artist’s fragmented body is pressed up against an infinite surface, in extreme tension, whose feeling is heightened by a sound environment comprised of low-frequency waves linked to the pressure of the body. The physicality of the sense takes on a performative dimension here to which the artist is very attached.

Constance Nouvel created for the entrance of the ground floor space a wall work in a corner that questions the new venue’s architecture. Photography, as a starting point, is compared here with its environment, between real space and suggested space.
Drawing is asked here to move out of the flatness of the image in a mise en abyme of the space and its representation.
The architectural particularity of the glazed stairwell captivated the artist Vivien Roubaud, who deployed three fireworks explosions in it using a cascading hanging.
The artist reveals the object’s possibilities, seeking to extract its hidden qualities and their development in the space, and in a moment that is usually impossible for us to grasp.
The first and second levels of the gallery propose group hangings, creating bridges between the works the explore the intersections between art and science, the economy and society, history and memory, great art and popular culture, the idea of territory through environmental disturbances and their consequences?

You will discover Patrick Corillon’s flyer in the Komunuma tote bag.
Between reality and fiction, the Belgian artists ponders what the cultural history of Romainville could be. He will create the performance « A sentimental history of the ventriloquist » on Sunday October 20 starting at 4 p.m. as an avant-première.

BLUM – IN SITU

Galleries — Fri, 17 May 2019 15:48:59 +0000

Andrea Blum
?Nomadic House?
April 26th ? June 6th 2003

For the past 20 years Andrea Blum has been making public projects in Europe and the United States which range in site and scale and include a campus, plaza, street, bus stop, newsstand, courtyard, library, video arcade, bedroom, furniture and exhibition design. Using an architectural language to manipulate the viewer in the public space, her interest is to highlight and confuse the differences between these sites in order to promote a social breakdown of content and context.
The work is designed to zoom in and out of the conditions which organize us as a culture, in order to affect us as individuals. The art/architecture/design lens is used as a filter to organize the social, political and psychological for public consumption.

Nomadic House is a project designed in response to the needs and habits of the nomadic resident. It is made of units which come apart, are easy to transport and flexible to arrange.The design reveals the identity of the occupant made visible through the skeletal structure of the work and the manner with which the belongings are arranged.
The structure is made of perforated steel coated with aluminum colored paint. It is made of 3 modules which include, a bed/couch, a closet ,and a table. These modules are built on wheels and can be easily moved to organize different ways of living. The table and bed slide in and out of the main structure with text designating its movement from a work space to an eating space and a living space to a sleeping space.

Rotational House, Rubix Cube House and Elevation House,etc. are designs for small urban living spaces. Their names imply their method of function.They open up,close down,rise,spin and slide in order to gain the maximum amount of living space at a time when space is money and money is scarce. They are designed to be affordable housing for the ?at home? freelance worker by providing the 4 basic living areas to sleep,eat,live and work.They all function independently from the basic utilities of kitchen and bath and consider the home as a livable sculpture.

NOUVEL – IN SITU

Galleries — Sun, 03 Mar 2019 12:45:32 +0000

What lies behind photos? From her first years at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, in Patrick Tosani’s studio, Constance Nouvel was interested in what constitutes the photographic medium; in La 25 eme image [The 25th photo] (2010), she literally dug into the layers of paper glued together to form reliefs, each stratum of which evoked yet another off?camera (unseen) element. Whether naturalistic or abstract, in two or three dimensions, her photographs, always taken by her, explore the concepts of frame, depth of field, materials used and so on. In her early works, the grid was everywhere, not only in the compositions, but also sometimes in a literal form, printed, for example, on a plexiglas plate placed on a photo (Decors II, 2010). At the Jeune Creation show in 2013, she even exhibited a straightforward photograph of a grid, a piece of cloth turned the wrong way round, the motif, as if by dint of being an obsession, extracted from the photos. A real mystery emanates from these somewhat indeterminate compositions. One is tempted to think that their content hardly matters, but we get caught up in the blues that are a little too blue, the strangely garish greens, the slightly overly bright oranges that colour the water, skies and rocks. Hesitant, we then make out an aquarium photographed from below (Décors XI, 2011), the decor in trompe-l’oeil of an indoor pool in Germany, in which a Riviera landscape appears (Décors XII, 2012), the model of a mountain covered with a glass case through which we catch sight of a diorama (De?cors XIII, 2013). The artifice that reigns over these scenes is significant. Gradually, progressively, Constance Nouvel’s photos began to unfold in space, starting with Bascule [Tipping Point] (2011), a work in which a photograph, which is a little too long, sticks out beyond its frame. What looks like clouds, sea and sand is actually the reflection of the light shining through a window onto a ceiling. There’s a movement from a real space to a suggested space: that of the ceiling, photography and what is out of shot. The sculptural element of these works functions as a real augmentation of photography, which would seem, for the artist, to offer a detour allowing her to reposition herself within her medium. Thus the Persistants [Persistents] (2014) series is made up of pictures pasted on small plaster modules that give them a unique dimension. Over the course of her work, as others have done before her, Constance Nouvel has questioned herself regarding the possible basis for her photographs. With her most recent work, La Derniere Levée [The Last Hand] (2014), she went as far as attempting to put the frame into the image. She created a kind of thread, drawing a maze, which runs to the centre of a maritime landscape at sunset. Out of this colourful vision, all we can make out is a gradation in colour. Gradually, as we approach the middle of the image, we see a relief (like in La 25e Image). The structure of the piece evokes a games tables inlaid with marquetry, games in which the last trick is the most important. Recently, in the Incidences [Incidences] (2013) series, and perhaps in an attempt to escape her own images, Constance Nouvel began some more abstract research. Sheets of white paper were folded and unfolded and then photographed. Then prints of these photos were folded and photographed again repeatedly. Constance Nouvel is looking for «what happens between the capturing of the real and its adaptation as an image». Photos never reproduce reality, this photographer seems to be saying. At best they transpose it.
By ANAEL PIGEAT
Constance Nouvel was born in Courbevoie in 1985. She lives and works in Paris. Translation, Jack Sims

NIGHT OF ANOTHER SPRING – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 10:04:44 +0000

WITH: RAMIN HAERIZADEH, ROKNI HAERIZADEH, HESAM RAHMANIAN

Constructing an artistic galaxy that explores subjects as varied and relevant as gender, power, exile and migration, the artistic collective composed of Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975, Tehran), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. 1978, Tehran) and Hesam Rahmanian (b. 1980, Knoxville) will present Night of Another Spring Part 1 at In Situ – fabienne leclerc, Paris.

The artists’ first personal exhibition in France, Night of Another Spring is divided into two parts. A first opening will take place on Saturday, 15 September 2018, offering an overview of their multidisciplinary oeuvre through videos, drawings, collages and paintings. Night of Another Spring: Part 1 will also mark the start of the artists’ residency in Paris, during which they will work within the gallery space for six weeks, producing polymorphic works and installations in situ that will be shown to the public on Saturday, 20 October 2018 as Night of Another Spring: Part 2.

In Situ – fabienne leclerc will also present a selection of Ramin, Rokni and Hesam’s works during FIAC, from 17 to 20 October 2018.

With a collaborative artistic practice that includes painting, drawing, video and immersive installations, Ramin, Rokni and Hesam propose a new definition of the collective in a constant state of movement and mutation, inviting friends and collaborators including carpenters, technicians, thinkers and caretakers to participate in their work. Transforming into a dastg?h – Persian for “device” or “machine” but also a melodic matrix in traditional music – Ramin, Rokni and Hesam act as operants within a collective organism, confronting issues such as power, otherness, displacement and destruction.

Night of Another Spring: Part 1 is structured around Reign of Winter, Big Rock Candy Montain, and Night of Another Spring, three artworks whose first two presented as moving paintings, employing a rotoscope of video news broadcasts that are subsequently transformed by the artists. Anthropomorphic zoomorphs and phytomorphs appear in lieu of human figures, and the artists evoke the Brechtian strategy of estrangement in order to re-contextualize images to which we have perhaps become desensitized.

The Royal Wedding’s theme, including the moving painting Reign of Winter and series of works that caustically straddles the border between draughtsmanship, painting and collage, is another expression of the artists’ reoccurring interest in subverting popularly held notions of legitimacy and prestige. As a grotesque deconstruction of an iconic image, The Royal Wedding is also a visual heir of modernism and surrealism.

Offering a meditation on the tension between high and low culture though their use of both traditionally artistic and banal materials, the artists ask us to re-examine forms, figures and issues absent from our field of vision. They work with a total freedom of rhetorical and visual strategies, employing distortion, subversion, inversion and obscuration at will in order to question habitual judgments. With experienced life as the common thread through Ramin, Rokni and Hesam’s work, any meeting, conversation, natural phenomena or event can become part of their creative process.

Tosani – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 08:42:43 +0000

Patrick Tosani

P.L.A.N.È.T.E.S

The “conquest of space” that the rivalry of the Russians and the Americans considerably publicized would have greatly marked the artists of the 1960s whom Patrick Tosani attentively studied when he was a student. The images of the moon were moreover used on the covers of the activist ecological magazine Whole Earth Catalog of the fall 1968, the spring 1969 and once again the fall 1970 issues, while at the same time, Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, synthesizing in a certain way the minimalism and the conquering intentions of the two great world powers of the period, the whole on a cosmic ballet in which the planets rotated on a melody from Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube.

This light from interstellar space to which I alluded is found in the most recent series by Patrick Tosani, who discovered, in that famous month of July 1969, those celebrated images of the moon. But it is in no way the artist’s intention to replay, based on an enactment, the fascination that an entire generation felt at the time. His starting point is moreover not the stars but earth itself. Speaking about his most recent works, he writes: “These images spoke of a ‘photographic’ memory of the city, of nature, events, facts… in a distant environment, one that perhaps was destroyed, perhaps was recreated, certainly in another temporality.” He then evokes the [moon’s] surface whose presence drew his attention and that became, for him, “the vector of a timeless representation and an infinite horizon” exploring the limits of photography.

Through these images then, which he captures, today, it is the appearance of what he calls “generic land,” based on which we imagine any kind of surface and any kind of space. It is what permits us to see the images brought back by NASA and also to imagine the world in which we live. Consequently, photographing plaster planets under stellar lights is not more artificial than restoring an image for us using a camera, no matter how precise it is.

Seen from a distance, we have the impression of being in the presence of a collection of astronomical images but as soon as we draw nearer we understand that this cannot be the case. What we thought was the uneven surface of the moon, or a comparable star, is only a simulation that does not try to pass for something else: plaster, clay, crumbly fragments and cracked paint. The procession of spheres that advance toward… the corner of the room where they were photographed immediately shows its colors: “an ironic and illusory exploration of a false stellar space that multiplies the ambiguities of interpretation,” as Tosani so aptly says.

Nonetheless, the trick works, a little like at the theater where the protocol states: everything here is artificial but you are going to believe it, you are going to feel things that seem to you to have come from your direct experience but all the while knowing that this is false. Yet the beauty of this work it that we dream in a papier-mâché or rather in a photographic concentrate world in which it is nothing but the light of volumes and expanse.

What is this planet hung above a concave surface on which it casts its shadow? And this other one that could be the photograph of an eclipse but that we quickly realize is nothing other than a shadow on a flat surface in a halo of light that is slightly larger than the supposed planet that produced it. These bodies floating in space evoke stars but aren’t and they tell us, inversely, how much of what we believe real when we give credit to scientific images is… only a group of photographic images. Which doesn’t prevent us from pondering the nature of this strange aircraft topped with a sparkling luminous specter like an aurora borealis and that, perhaps even more than the others, accentuates the ambiguity of what we see: folded rubber, a jellyfish or a flying saucer, a creature from the cosmos or from the nethermost regions, or the metamorphoses of the visible that art makes us aware of.

Extract of «Spationaute», 2017, Gilles A. Tiberghien

HADJITHOMAS – JOREIGE – IN SITU

Galleries — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:24:53 +0000

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige:

I Must First Apologize…

ShowingFebruary 19, 2016 – April 17, 2016

The culmination of a major project by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, this exhibition presents a body of work that looks at the history of online spam and scamming through film, sculpture, photography, and installation. Hadjithomas and Joreige have collected and archived a certain kind of spam e-mail—unsolicited messages from strangers—since 1999. These are schemes rooted in historical confidence tricks such as The Spanish Prisoner, which dates back to the sixteenth century. Aimed at swindling the recipient into transferring money to alleviate various invented personal hardships, collectively these e-mail scams delineate a map of recent geopolitical conflict, social unrest, and economic upheaval. Throughout this body of work, Hadjithomas and Joreige probe into the structures of belief and storytelling: they unfold a complex set of relationships marked by intimacy, trust, greed, and desire, all in relation to the internet and technology. The exhibition charts a kind of narrative itinerary ranging from various works that present intimate correspondence between scammers and victims to so-called “trophy” photographs extracted by vigilante scam-baiters and several video works that feature real or fictional protagonists of scams, including the major new installation The Rumor of the World (2014).

Hadjithomas and Joreige (both b. 1969, Beirut, Lebanon) live and work in Beirut and Paris. They have collaborated as filmmakers and artists since 1997. Their feature film Je Veux Voir (I Want to See) won Best Film of 2008 by the French Critics Guild. Their photographs and installations have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; SF MoMA, California; and New Museum, New York.Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: I Must First Apologize… is organized in collaboration with Villa Arson, Nice, France; and HOME, Manchester, UK; and is curated by Eric Mangion for Nice, Omar Kholeif and Sarah Perks for Manchester, and Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA.

The exhibition is accompanied by The Rumors of the World: Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet, a new publication edited by Omar Kholeif and published by Sternberg Press, in association with Villa Arson, Nice, France; HOME, Manchester UK; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA. The publication features contributions from the artists and Nicolas Auray, Finn Brunton, Henriette Huldisch, Omar Kholeif, Norman M. Klein, Franck Leibovici, Éric Mangion, Laura U. Marks, Sarah Perks, Jacques Rancière, Uzma Z. Rizvi, and Rasha Salti.

Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, John Makhoul, and Cultural Service of the French Consulate in Boston, with additional support from the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, Terry & Rick Stone, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. Special thanks to CRG Galler, New York.