ENTRACTE

Pioneer of the ceramics’ rebirth in contemporary art, Johan Creten is back with his exhibition named Entracte, his fourth solo show at the Parisian gallery. This exhibition can be considered as a symbolic pause. It’s an invitation to reflection and a way to take a deep breath. With Entracte the artist underlines the importance of beauty in his work, while reaffirming his humanist consciousness and the social and politi-cal resonance of his practice. This exhibition is built as a dialogue with I Peccati, his monographic exhibition at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, from 15 October to 31 January 2021.

“You have already held a fish, haven’t you? It’s slippery. At once pleas-ant and rather disgusting. Contrary to what one might think, it’s not the humidity that makes our phalanges slither on the scales, but a viscous secretion produced by the animal itself. This substance has a protective function and many virtues. The mucus acts as a wall against parasites, bacteria and certain heavy metals. It limits external aggressions. Depending on the species, it enables the fish to swim faster, like a per-formance catalyst. Lastly, it ensures the fish’s relative survival outside its natural environment. Its slimy texture lubricates the fleshy walls, like any living organism whose membranes, which cover the cavities that are open towards outside, are called mucous membranes precisely. They are precious interfaces that connect the interior to the exterior, and this is what gives them an extreme sensibility.

This is Johan Creten’s fourth solo exhibition at Perrotin Paris. Everything shines here. Depending on the finish of the pieces, this shininess is more or less offensive, from the clarity of a patina to the stark brightness of an enamel. In the main room, several ensembles collectively form a panorama that calls to mind a marine world. Algae and shells remain identifiable motifs, swelling the iconography in the room through their graphic nature and their manner.

Several emerging Venuses are spiked with still humid petals. Their finery seems to consist of a density of tonic lips fixed in the impermeability of the glaze. One can smell the tide. The feminine contours take shape in series such as Odore Di Femmina and La Perle Noire, and of course The Herring, which surveys this drenched landscape in a god-like manner.The fascinating mood exuded by various glands thus wraps the body in a film that equips it with a transparent armor. Today the properties of this gelatin have drawn the interest of the scientific community, who see in the exceptional mucus a promising material that might revolutionize industry, especially the textile industry. Still underwater, the excretions of some specimens are composed of fibers whose quality may resemble the most delicate of silks. Thus, in its adult state, the hagfish, a kind of sea serpent that has haunted the abyss with its digestive tract since the dawn of time, is said to produce up to a million kilometers of this thread that is a hundred times thinner than a single hair. What a verti-go-inducing resource. This potential passementerie remains a defen-sive system of fatal efficiency for this type of eel. Once expelled, their mucus can occupy up to several hundred times its initial volume, instantly suffocating any predator, whose gills it causes to explode.

Johan Creten constantly stimulates the temptation to touch. A primor-dial taboo in many religions, including the religion of art, contact feeds the swelling of desire, making the other senses seem like preliminaries with regard to the fulfilment it demands. The ultimate taboo often claims to preserve the status of untouchable works in contrast to the vulgarity of objects that can be grasped and handled. To caress a bronze, to touch a ceramic are acts of transgression. There is the dual risk of hurt-ing oneself and of damaging the artefact. Here the artist even goes so far as to make us sit on the works. With his new series of Boulders, seven possible seats each possess a deadly sin. The installation devel-ops a certain symmetry with its Italian counterpart on display at the Villa Medici in Rome, to which an important monograph is devoted, ostensi-bly entitled I Peccati. Set up in the expectation of a catch, the situation recalls the stimulating articulation between pécheur (sinner) and pêcheur (fisherman).

Halieutics, the science of fishing, aims for a sensible management of aquatic ecosystems. It intervenes in the agronomy of the liquid bio-sphere. It also intervenes in research and informs scientists in their experiments in zootechnics. But for the moment, the creature with the miraculous mucus has resisted domestication and has failed to repro-duce in captivity. It thus refuses to see its invaginations exploited for the benefit of fashion corporations. And it is satisfied with its existence as a monster of the deep – a scavenger at that. Because it is indeed necro-phagous and has a habit of making its way into the remains to devour them from within. It cultivates in its own way a passion for the carcass, a tradition of the grotesque, that imperative hollow of cast iron or terra-cotta. Wrapped in its cloak of mucus, it remains ungraspable. Having said this, as any fish farmer will tell you, it is best to hold a fish with wet hands. It will be a little less slippery. It is therefore covered in drops of water that the surfaces touch. One generally takes part in such an inti-mate act in order to eviscerate. The swollen belly is then sliced cleanly, spilling its shimmering viscera.

Johan Creten opens up his shapes and their connotations enough not to freeze them in a single reading. The interpretations must remain mal-leable, from humor to disgust. He himself feeds off this ongoing quest for an image to gorge on. The series entitled Glory testifies in particular to this act of evasion. Its golden luster prevents the gaze from anchor-ing itself, its luminous intensity making us skid on the reliefs. A certain dynamism operates through motion and light, affirming the kinetic com-ponent of these modules. Theirs is a penetrating perspective. It draws us into a hypnotic vortex which inhales, which exhales. The rays expand towards the baroque splendors erected to exalt the sacred, all the while contracting to pierce the most secret depths of human morphology. In the distance lies this original black hole, a gap. Let’s call it Vulva. And since everything has always passed through a slit, that is precisely where the artist wants us to begin.”

Joël Riff

Photo : ODORE DI FEMMINA – SOLFATARA, 2019. Glazed stoneware. Sculpture : 39 3/8 × 20 1/2 × 18 1/8 inch | Sculpture : 100 × 52 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin

The exhibition that Pieter Vermeersch has created for Perrotin Paris – his sixth solo exhibition for this gallery, the third in Paris – will not, it is to be feared, reassure those who are worried about his art in general and his conception of painting in particular. Worrying, indeed, because without equivalent – but with enough historical reference points to give our X-rays something to work on.

Vermeersch’s artwork feeds on all the antagonisms of the discipline, seeking, for example, to be both figurative (it always has a photographic source, and these photographs are always made by Vermeersch, even when they are what he calls “accidental”) and abstract (because these “accidental” photographs often only have to offer a few informal color variations). Even when the canvas is “abstract,” it is paradoxically fabri-cated as a photorealistic painting, the photographic image being repro-duced in it through a meticulous system of grids. Of the canvas, it sometimes only retains the format, leading it towards other media: in the Paris exhibition, the first room includes silkscreen prints on marble and the last room displays a set of oil paintings on fossilized wood – a wood that, as Vermeersch puts it, time has “mineralized.” In the marble silkscreen prints, “matter becomes image” in favor of an “industrializa-tion of pointillism.”

Vermeersch’s art is neither illustrative nor narrative: in short, art is its only crutch. His process often starts from the materials – for example, images of marble are silkscreened onto the marble and the image is enlarged to such an extent that each grid dot shows the support around it – and from the virtues and personal stories that the artist projects onto them. The works, and even more so the exhibitions, translate into a physical experience Vermeersch’s scientific and poetic reflections – reflections which focus on time and space. This is not a program that the viewer should decipher or identify traces of in the works and exhibi-tions (the works are not the literal translation of a thought) but, say, the source from which they flow. Without ever renouncing oil painting on canvas, the artist’s constant experimentation with new techniques (here, silkscreen printing on marble) and new materials (fossilized wood) charges the work with diversity and complexity.

The moment of the exhibition, for Pieter Vermeersch, is truly a moment of crystallization that goes beyond the presentation of the works. More precisely, his exhibitions are ingenious systems – of perception, reflec-tion, apprehension – which put into practice in a more literal way the divisions of time and space. The “room divider”, work of Pieter Vermeersch and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, that contradicts the first room – made of slats (mirror on one side, image on the back) and shaped like a comma – punctuates the movement of the spectator, “slows down” the visit, poeticizes the space and multiplies the possibilities of framing the gaze. The paintings and the space of the room are reflected in this mirrored curve, and the white cube is shattered – Vermeersch shapes the context in such a way that, according to his beautiful formula, it is less a question of seeing the works than of discovering them. In doing so, he also takes a step in the direction that is opposed to the “civilization of access” that characterizes the contemporary age.

The ingenious moment of the exhibition is also when the wall works are temporarily confronted with the materials and colors of this “room divider”: in the Paris exhibition, the polycarbonate and the mirror, indus-trial products, stage the marble and wood in a conflicting manner. Sim-ilarly, the works themselves expose conflicts between the industrial and the natural, for example, through the application of the chemical com-ponents of screen-printing ink on raw marble. Conflictual or as “beauti-ful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella?” The system that makes up Vermeersch’s exhibition organizes the viewer’s experience of these conflicts in a way that also keeps logic at bay.

Eric Troncy

Photo : Untitled, 2020. Silkscreen on marble, 57 x 43.5 x 2 cm | 22 7/16 x 17 1/8 x 0 13/16 inch, 13.00 kg. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin

CREATURE COMFORTS

“April is the cruelest month…,” announced T.S. Eliot in his post-Spanish flu poem, The Waste Land (1922); Virginia Woolf sent her influenza survivor protagonist, Clarissa, to buy the flowers herself in Mrs. Dallo-way (1925). During the same pandemic, Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch reached the canvas to depict their auto-portraits, tinted by uncertainty, paranoia, and malady.

Perrotin welcomes visitors to Creature Comforts, the gallery’s fifth exhi-bition with American painter Hernan Bas, featuring thirteen new paint-ings the artist has created since March at his Miami studio. A sense of poetic tension prevails the works Bas painted in various scales that range from larger-than-life to intimate, reflecting the broad palette of sentiments experienced by his paintings’ protagonists. A signature in the artist’s unabashedly gilded universe, a suit of young adult men pop-ulate borderline surreal mises en scène with angst remnant from teen-age years and fragility towards the impending manhood. Equally persistent and delicate, blasé twinks gingerly execute flamboyant acts—they flirt with danger, waltz with death, and huddle with pain. Their aloof expressions contradict with the ardor they deliver within each scenario that maneuvers between absurd and perilous. Overall, they challenge our oh-so relished quarantine comforts, ornately tran-scended in Bas’s brushstrokes from mundane to baroque.

Elegance and demise are balanced in Dinner hour at the Little Shop of Horrors, in which a boy’s green gloves grasp a metal chain elevating an animal carcass inside a nursery for carnivorous plants. He satisfies the demurely barbarian plants’ hunger for flesh, not with the enormous slab of meat, but with flies tempted by the smell of the raw cut, depicted here à la Chaim Soutine. In Hot Seat, stakes for risk are high, as well as the length of a serpent draping from the ceiling and nestle around a boy’s neck. A scarlet shade of red washes the room where a terrarium with a host of reptiles occupies the background. A scorching lamp and the boy’s matching-colored shirt complete the inferno Bas illuminates with inspiration from Munch’s Self-Portrait in Hell (1903). Sanguine hues echo in Three Vampires and Nectar (or the hummingbird enthusi-ast), evidently in A+ type blood two boys preserve in medical bags to nourish their pet bat in the former, yet deceptively in the latter. Here, nectar-filled bottles suspend from the branches of a lush tree, perched by a jubilant youngster also feeding his pet avian, a purple-headed hummingbird. A young gentleman seeks shelter behind a sheer veil in How Best to Suffer Swamp Life at Dusk, masking his blue eyes under a ghostly net shrouding over an umbrella against greedy mosquitos. Sheer yet resilient, the veil is already dotted with bugs unable to devour the boy for his blood. Similar to the exhibition’s other subjects, the boy is positioned between discomfort and posture, willfully assuming a pre-carious position in a duello with natural critters.

After nearly two decades since Bas started painting them, the boys—modern day Ganymede’s, Tadzio’s and Elio’s—signal passage into maturity, reflected in their selfless and fatally generous gestures. These young men embrace risks at the expense of their beauty, which has been both their armor and ornament. Once indulgent aesthetes and wistful romantics, they, now, sacrifice their vital fluids or forego their dwellings in attempts to accommodate comforts of creatures they dar-ingly hold dear. In Adult Security Blanket, one fashions his all-black attire with a royal blue blanket, emblazoned with: “Adult security blan-ket. If lost return to D. Bell,” based on a thrift store find in Bas’s collec-tion for over a decade. The box of the original blanket, which is not depicted in the painting, reads: “When all seems to fail, try this ‘true companion’ for comforting consolation…”

Osman Can Yerebakan

New York, September, 2020

Photo : How Best to Suffer Swamp Life at Dusk, 2020. 274,3 × 213, 4 cm | 9 × 7 ft. ©Silvia Ros. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Alberto Magnelli, Jean Leppien, Jean Deyrolle, and Emile Gilioli, brought together by the Galerie Lahumière for a show titled Géométries Sensibles, represent the rebirth of geometric abstraction in France after the Second World War. These artists—born between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, in Germany, Italy, or France—were not always at the same stage of artistic development, the war having been a period of exile, imprisonment, isolation, and great destitution. Yet during the optimistic post-war reconstruction, all four imparted a renewed vitality to their work, established strong bonds of friendship, and often exhibited together in Parisian galleries and salons. They did not meet only in Paris, for sometimes they preferred the quiet, delightful atmosphere of Provence, where some of them moved permanently (Magnelli to Grasse, Leppien to Roquebrune, and Deyrolle to Gordes). The works assembled for this show reveal the extent to which southern light, color, landscapes, and architecture inspired them and helped to reinvigorate their creativity.

For Magnelli, the eldest of the four, the post-war period saw the culmination of a nearly forty-year career divided between his native Italy and his adopted country, France. Magnelli’s paintings, endowed with what art critic Achille Bonito Oliva called “a silent, internal geometry all their own,” sought a state of rhythmic equilibrium in which clearly defined shapes, often set against black, went from acute angles to rounded arcs, as in Formes Variées (1958). The mat quality of his colors, applied with respect for the picture plane, evoked the art of frescoes, so beloved by Magnelli (who originally came from Florence and was a great admirer of Piero della Francesca). Imbuing his paintings with a delicate light, Magnelli developed highly refined chromatic relationships based on the use of shot effects in hues of brown, ocher, bistre, gray-blue, etc. He thereby offset the strict compositional architecture of his paintings with sensual colors and supple shapes. This geometric sensitivity appealed to younger artists who, seeking to escape overly rigid pictorial construction, opted for less formal stylistic principles.

Jean Deyrolle, who came to abstraction in 1944, particularly appreciated the sense of visual rhythm in Magnelli’s paintings. Malon, painted in Gordes in the summer of 1953, is typical of Deyrolle’s first abstract period, in which geometric shapes overlap in a way that establishes broad areas of color. Warm and cool hues alternate, thereby creating a gentle harmony that accords with the use of tempera, a medium that Magnelli had taught him. Oreus (1966), from Deyrolle’s mature period, testifies to his simultaneously methodical and sensitive grasp of painting: the central motif is a broken circle with echoes that create an impression of spatial reverberations across the canvas. Diagonal slashes crossing the pictorial field contribute to the impression of breakage, which is nevertheless attenuated by the use of a palette knife to apply paint in fluid, rhythmic strokes, producing an expressive power that also stems from the artist’s bodily involvement: for Deyrolle, a work’s sensuality arises from physical gesture of stroking. His specialty entailed the marriage of a rigorous abstract language with a heightened pictorial sensitivity allied to nature—as notably found in the south of France.

The same determination to avoid an overly formal organization through the supple use of line can be seen in Jean Leppien’s work. His idea of painting, derived from Kandinsky—under whom he studied at the Bauhaus in 1930—involved “translating a mood or state of mind into pure forms and colors.” Indeed, a composition from 1949 (6/49 LIII) is based on a dynamic articulation of large curves whose interpenetration delimits the colored surface into the two strict dimensions of the pictorial field. Leppien’s smooth, precise handling adds to the harmony of the painting, whose melodious nature expresses his own sensibility. This poetic grasp of painting would be also seen in his later adoption of more richly layered paint and warmer tones, endowing his works with a luminous, fleshy presence. In the paintings of that period, Leppien reconciled geometry and impasto by extensively simplifying the elements in a composition, reduced to basic symbols like circles or rectangular shapes, as seen in a work from 1961 (5/61 XIII).

Sculptor Emile Gilioli went abstract after the war, a period when he notably became friends with Deyrolle, Dewasne, and Poliakoff. He, too, was seeking a balance between rigor and sensuality in his work. “I wanted my sculpture to be like overripe fruit that bursts from too much juice,” declared Gilioli in 1946. “I wanted my statues to radiate with substance. I wanted to make sculpture that was three-dimensional, static, dynamic, and cosmic.” His clear interest in Brancusi’s sculpture led Gilioli toward a pure abstraction in which the perfection of volumes and a striking precision of lines were attained thanks to absolute mastery of materials and polishing techniques. The light that generously plays across gilded bronze surfaces fluidly underscores the transition from curve to angle, from dense volumes to smooth planes (Vitesse, 1976). The two themes dear to Gilioli, a diagonal line (illustrating the conquest of space) and a sphere (symbolizing the sun) meet in Fleur Coupée (ca. 1960). The pure, elementary shapes of Gilioli’s sculptures, like their sensual, luminous presence, transcend the anecdotal to attain the universal.

The Géométries Sensibles exhibition demonstrates the way that Magnelli, Leppien, Deyrolle, and Gilioli drew on the warm, light-drenched climate of southern France to find a new source of inspiration for their works, as perfectly illustrated by earthy colors and shimmering textures brought to life by a soft, delicate luminosity.

Domitille d’Orgeval

Alberta Pane Gallery is pleased to present the third solo exhibition by the Italian artist Michelangelo Penso. In the Paris gallery, the interactive sculpture Human vibe accompanies a series of prints on aluminium, rubber and wood.

Michelangelo Penso’s aesthetics is inhabited by macro and micro-organisms. His work is strongly inspired by scientific iconography, mostly coming from mathematics, genetics, and astrophysics. His artworks, created from industrial materials such as polyester, rubber, resin or aluminium, evoke DNA chains as well as constellations and planetary systems.

Human vibe consists of a small meteorite-like mineral object equipped with a system of touch sensors, which send out sound frequencies according to captured vibrations. By interacting with Human vibe, we can “tune in” to a flow of information emitted by our body, which is normally undetectable for us. Interaction develops by touching both sides of the sculpture, which are coated with tin to enable capturing the electrical response from the skin (GSR). The enclosed technology (microcomputer, sensors, miniature audio systems) processes these signals continuously and makes the sculpture react with sound and vibrations.

Human vibe, located in the center of the exhibition space, is surrounded by a series of paintings (Frequencies) showing astro-seismograms coming from recordings of electromagnetic radiations emitted by three planetary systems (HD 10180, HIP 41378, TRAPPIST-1 ).

Stars, as human bodies, generate vibrations which can be recorded by specific sensors. These scientific discoveries provide today a better understanding of the functioning and composition of astronomical bodies. The exhibition Frequencies attempts to translate the invisible complexity of physical and biological interactions into a perceptible form or language. The artist invites us to become aware of the vibrations sent out by microscopic, human, and astronomical bodies. He encourages us to consider the reactions that these vibrations trigger in the elements that surround us on very different scales. As in a scientific laboratory, this exhibition allows to experience the imperceptible resonances that we produce. It also invites to look attentively at the shapes of the invisible frequencies of stars and planets.

Relations between humans and technological systems take an increasingly significant place in Michelangelo Penso’s latest research. In this context, he proposes us to experience frequencies, which link the infinitely big and the infinitely small: two systems that are invisible to the human eye.