Atmosphères sensibilisées* takes the relationship to space in Jean-Luc Vilmouth’s work as its starting point.

This space may be mental and encourage projections and dreams, or physical and conform to units of measurement. It could be social and facilitate encounters. The space is the expanse that does not obstruct movement. In philosophy, space refers to the ideal environment that holds all of our perceptions; indefinite, it contains all existing or conceivable objects.

The spatial dimension composes the work of Jean-Luc Vilmouth, who used to refer to himself as an “augmenter” rather than a sculptor. Combined with questions of disconcerting simplicity – how do we imagine other types of relationships? How do we continue to inhabit the world? – his works soberly highlight what already exists and what we don’t wish to see. Just like a breath, a space opens up. They thwart the cognitive biases of apprehending reality to consider more direct relationships, to narrow the distance that separates humans from their environment.

Jean-Luc Vilmouth has taught at the art schools of Grenoble – together with Ange Leccia – and Paris, and has led several generations of artists to question the exhibition format and the very idea of sculpture. About the workshop, he explained: “I try to give it a certain climate. Atmosphères sensibilisées perhaps sensitive to something other than just making artworks.” In France and internationally, his work has largely contributed to the shift from an aesthetic interest in the object, in the 1980s, to that of the installation and the environment, in the 1990s and 2000s.

To extend the monograph devoted to him at the MO.CO Hôtel des Collections in Montpellier last spring, the exhibition Atmosphères sensibilisées brings together the work of eight artists who have evolved through their contact with him: Ange Leccia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Seulgi Lee, Véronique Joumard, Florian Mermin,

Mao Tao, Gaël Lévêque, and Leïla White-Vilmouth. It is about dream- and trance-like spaces, activable or suspended, dry climates or wetlands.

Atmosphères sensibilisées suggests the most intense and yet the simplest aspects of Jean-Luc Vilmouth’s teachings: “to be relational; to be experiential”.

Opening Sunday October 12, 6pm – 9pm

The Jousse Entreprise gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Flo et les Maximum, showing the work of Florence Doléac and the Maximum collective.

In particular, the exhibition will be showing a series of new pieces: three jointly signed beds, produced together with the gallery. They are part of the project undertaken by the designers for a long time now. Florence Doléac’s work issues from meeting points. Between form and function, interior and exterior, the new and the used, the removed wit of titles and a concern with what lasts, we find the collective’s personal expression: its pieces deal as much with dreamlike and private appropriation as with an ethical line of thinking about the making of our most ordinary objects. She is also highly aware of the decline of industry in France. Over and above social dramas, job losses also mean the disappearance of a great deal of know-how. Her objects also call for the rekindling and adaptation of vanished techniques, as well as the invention of new ones. Manufacturing techniques like so many tools of a poetics. Let us also mention her generosity towards young generations of artists. Florence Doléac has always been especially attentive to her students (this is the case with the Maximum members, like Antoine Boudin and his bamboo boats, and Nathanaël Abeille and his solar reflectors), at times joining with them to create something in common (the term “community” often crops up in her work).

Based in Ivry, in an old factory (which indicates another point shared with Florence Doléac), the Maximum members base their work on the notion of “over-cycling” (surcyclage). While recycling destroys an object and just hangs on to the materials, over-cycling preserves existing objects to create new functions from them. Otherwise put, they create a virtuous method by reversing the usual design procedure. By saving as much as possible of the work that has permitted the manufacture of an object, they try to use its strength and, in this process, tame forms coming from elsewhere. Their method thus constructs an alternative waste cycle, under the twofold sign of inventiveness and economy. This approach also has to do with form and quality (especially that of gesture and material) as much as quantity: it is usually a matter of mass-producing objects which have themselves been made in this way.

The beds on view in the gallery come from “Vauban” barriers, used in public places to channel and “park” crowds. Their ordinary repressive use is diverted here for uses associated with pleasure and rest. If, given their ordinary use, they have quite a short shelf-life, these barriers are nevertheless solid. Through a series of technical shifts (folding, bending, welding), they have been turned into bed structures, before being flocked. The flocking of such pieces (which is to say the application of a sort of velvet on the surface) is also typical of this transfer activity, peculiar as much to Florence Doléac as to the Maximum collective, because it is normally reserved for small objects. The covers, made by Bilum, are made from scraps of hot-air balloon fabrics*, which provide a material that is at once light, airy, supple and strong, as well as the colour coding for the three beds; olive- green, royal blue and a red which conjures up things erotic. The beds are accompanied by ingenious props and result from the same over-cycling logic, things like bedside lights turned into candlesticks, a closet, and shelves… Because of the materials they are made with, these beds can be used both indoors and outdoors.

So they are part and parcel of Florence Doléac’s earlier works, like her “Dream beds”, which she devised to unite a Community of Dreamers, Maxidreams (stickers meant to augment the work will be handed out during the show). Other pieces will be shown, such as a series of mirrors, Palmito 2, made of recycled materials (carpet, bull-pack…) and Marchand de sable, kinds of brushes for zen drawings that you stick into black sand.

The exhibition thus builds a choral circuit between singular and plural and is inviting the Maximum collective to

On the night of the opening, the catalogue Minute Papillon — produced with the support of Cnap Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visual Arts), France — will be presented in the gallery, before beKing involved in another presentation at the Ricard Foundation, on October, 29th at 7 pm.

There appeared out of the darkness, suddenly and in increasingly greater number, DOUBLES, MANNEQUINS, AUTOMATONS, HOMUNCULI. Replica, duplicate, clone, twin, facsimile, model, doppelgänger, dummy, surrogate. How many ways to say the same? A surfeit of terms for the duplicate, triplicate — multiple — and so — and on — ad infinitum. Imitation, impostor, mimic, mime, echo, fake, ersatz. How many ways, and why, to say the same, but different; for better and/or for worse?
How to overcome, how to liberate something from itself — subject, object, symbol, likeness — in order that we might see it better? For each approximation is also an absence, a prosthesis: the phantom limb that flushes in its proximal want, in its embodied remembrance, as it hovers over the form of the original.

In Matthew Darbyshire’s series of sculptures, process is a critical strategy by which to address this question of liberation. Objects are re-interpreted on-screen into digital models which are then then printed in concrete by the artist, using a crude 3D print nozzle fashioned from a hand-drill and a concrete filled hopper.
10 new works exhibited at Jousse Enterprise are entitled Xerox Series and invoke Darbyshire’s ongoing interest in dismantling, through aspects of craft, mechanical and digital means of reproduction. Each object  is fed from 100 litres of concrete, the volume of the average human body — rendering all of the new works, regardless of their original references, identical in volume.
Surfaces of rough concrete extrusions are tightly pressed, rigid intestinal coils that curl towards the fleshy heart of the matter: process achieves gradations of similarity and difference that pull us inside of the object to see what it is really made up of, the messy organic materials. In form and content alike: take it apart to put it back together. The same, but different. And it is the almosts, the not quites — ever the never, even the impossible — that sustain us, inside and outside of objects, alive in the knowledge of their contours. Length, width, height — volume — which is to say — dimensions, in three.

While Darbyshire’s sculptures explore the complexities of replication, and the rich possibilities therein, they are also studies of repetition — reversion, inversion, perversion. Compulsive attention to serial repetition, embedded in the artist’s process, highlights the structural and aesthetic distinctions of each new object. As the objects inexorably repeat their altered forms, tensely suspended between the digitally printed and the handmade, they give rise to the freedom of obsessionality as a form of company that departs from the exact to embrace skill, craft and the ardently belaboured. Immaculately ordered filth, carefully contained extrusions are frozen mid-coagulate, as if at the heart of the heart — beating or no — is the hopeful truth of repetition: it brings into being that which otherwise passes unseen.

Thomas Grünfeld’s appreciation for objects is not merely formal but also relates to a specific functionality. Often using items of furniture as a starting point, he refers to conventional shapes and materials (related to homes and practices of interior design or decoration) and their corresponding usage, also implying the emotional and expressive (and representative) connotations found in a particular aesthetics or design. On a level of artistic appropriation and abstraction, he then recombines these characteristic properties whilst retaining a remote resemblance, a recollection of an original form, from which this new hybrid is derived. Grünfelds ambiguous sculptures constantly tease their beholder, questioning expectations and experiences, so that one is suspended in a state of imbalance between identification and alienation. In his deconstruction of familiar surroundings, Grünfeld follows a reductive approach, breaking down the inventory to simple basic forms and materials, which he cites and at the same time de- and recontextualizes.