At the beginning of the 1990s, Martin Kersels experimented with his body. As an active member of the group SHRIMPS (with Pam Casey, Gail Gonzalez, Steven Nagler, Ryan Hill and Weba Garretson), he performed a series of familiar and simple gestures: holding, throwing, falling, kissing, cadencing, rocking; performances that oscillated between radicality and the absurd, both transpiring through the photographs taken during the performance. Simultaneously, he developed a 3-dimensional work guided by movement. Inspired by objects and the body language of daily life, Martin Kersels builds not only staged spaces where body and machine interact, but also animated sculptures producing incongruous actions and sounds. The bizarre dimension of his work is only a facade, his plastic work is in fact underpinned by a conceptual and critical reflexion on our relations to the world and society. The constant discussion between bodies, space, and the object is an integral part of his practice.
For his new exhibition at Galerie Vallois, Martin Kersels questions the myth of the Olympus. Heaven for the gods, protected from men, the Olympus symbolised perfection (both body and spirit), complete happiness, joy of life, the carefree and plentiful. And yet, after reading Homer’s Odysseus, the artist observed that gods, just as men, are not exempt from vileness, vices and mediocrity. “They looked like gods, but acted like humans. By western standards of aesthetics and ethics, the exterior did not match interior”.* A space is created between inside and outside,the appearance (what we are supposed to represent) and the essence (what we actually are); a dichotomous vision which the artist applies to objects by questioning the relations between a product and its mode of fabrication, between surface and materiality, between form and function. The exhibition in its formal aspect is also an element of disruption: Olympus (2014) sets the exhibition space into motion, now mobile and unpredictable. A synergetic dynamic is at work as a removable structure that transforms and regenerates forms; meanwhile the viewer’s circulation participates in upsetting the general balance.

At the heart of a surprising scenography are bricolage works, the materials of which come from daily life. Altered, accumulated, associated, they tend towards abstraction. Playing on fake pretences, the sculptures underline the notion of passing, from one state to another, from the familiar to the strange. The loss of control, of bearings and the shift (perceptive, spatial, temporal and corporeal) push the viewer to rethink myths, norms, objects which constitute her/his own environment.By exploring the both pathetic and absurd dimension of society, Martin Kersels creates a critical space where disobedience, joy, incoherence and derision open the way for a possible liberation.

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.