« To encounter the work of Robert Montgomery is to make a tender encounter whose tenderness is enhanced by the public, communal quality of his work. To encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light”- Dane Weatherman

No one has blended language, form and light in such a direct way as Robert Montgomery. From December 4 to January 15, the Scottish-born, London-based artist who stands out by bringing a poetic voice to the discourse of text art, presents the vitality and richness of his work at Danysz gallery – Paris.

Verse after verse of translucent and intuitive poetry, Montgomery invites us to reflect on ways to salvage paradise, rebuilding it from wreckage and going back to a natural sense of peace through an awe-inspiring melancholic yet hopeful lyricism. As he explains, “I think melancholy is really interesting, because it is the creation of beauty from sadness… It’s only when we begin to destroy the planet that we realize we were living in paradise.”

For “Salvage Paradise”, his first solo show within the walls of Danysz gallery Paris – in collaboration with Writer and Art Curator, Barbara Polla – the  artist who works in a conceptual post-Situationist tradition, recreates the wealth and complexity of his universe with light installations, paintings, woodcuts, watercolors, photographs of his fire poems (works with fire as a nod to Celtic tradition) and digital works.

Cutting to the core of the most crucial issues of our times, Montgomery who defines himself as an « artist who works with poetry,” works in language and is best known for his site-specific installations, light, solar, fire and space. Commenting on our contemporary society and highlighting his personal and philosophical beliefs, he engages completely with the public through his evocative, cryptic and emotionally resonant art.

« In his work Robert Montgomery proves why and how poetry is of the utmost importance today, maybe more than ever. Poetry helps us link our inner world and dreams, terrors, desires… to the world around us. Poetry is sharing our inner world with the world. This is the magic of Robert Montgomery’s art. » – Barbara Polla

Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in Scotland. He was initially inspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, but also the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the art of James Turrell. He was the British artist selected for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2012, the first biennale in India, and the Yinchaun Biennale in 2016. He has had made public installations across Europe including major outdoor light installations on the site of the old US Air Force base at Tempelhof in Berlin. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas and the Albright Knox in New York. He has had solo museum projects at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, and the Cer Modern Museum in Ankara. He has worked with low consumption LED lighting and solar power since 2010 and he was one of the official artists for ArtCOP21 in Paris in 2015. His work is hugely popular on the internet, the piece “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You” has been shared online more than 20 million times.

Photo : Robert Montgomery, Salvage Paradise – Courtesy Danysz gallery

Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, who make up the famous duo, find inspiration in the visual world of their youth. A world permeated by comics from the 80s, Hollywood movies, Spaghetti Westerns, children’s stories. Permeated as well by commercial imagery and strewn with references to the recent American history.

In this vast iconography, the two artists cut out fragments, fiddle with them, transform them, combine them in countless different ways. An approach that recalls the art of collage: the art of bringing up unstable compositions, mashed up stories, semantic collisions. Faile is known for its striking aesthetic beaming with energy and immediately recognizable. Multitalented artists, the two work with the same ease across a wide range of media: painting on canvas, screen printing, stenciling, posters, sculpture, as well as monumental murals.

In this exhibition, Faile explores new graphic possibilities, introduces new themes, plays with cultural text borrowed from Disney and with elements taken from their personal lives, such as vinyls and books. We find in these new works something of a return to the roots, with references to graffiti as well as to a previous stay in Paris: the poster of a Birdy Nam Nam concert at the Olympia, a forgotten bicycle, the emblematic white tiling on the Paris subway, etc.

In three years – since their last exhibition in Paris – Faile has pursued and deepened its narrative experiments. Here the two artists are having fun letting their creative juices splash out of the frame, transforming the walls of the gallery by covering them with wild, large, ureal landscapes, giving the space a false air of the great American West. But a West contaminated or infiltrated by urban references, lettering or drawings straight out of comic books. Hanging their works on these backgrounds teeming with their signature patterns, the artists create a compelling dialogue between foreground and background, between form and content… As in a mirror game, this mise en abyme is endlessly refracted and the eye is constantly leaping from the paintings to the walls, from one reference to another, feeding on the wealth of the artists’ creations.

Faile stirs the waters and pioneers new modes of visual expression that are sure to surprise and seduce with their originality.