A few years ago, Emily Mae Smith selected an unexpected yet
inexhaustible muse: a simple straw broom, dually anthropomorphic and
gendered (the artist applies the pronoun “she”).
In the exhibition Harvesters, we find “her” without the round glasses the
artist frequently accessorized her in, and is seen either disguised as a
scholar-candle and burning down while reading a book of spells (The
Alchemist), resting languidly in a wheat field (Harvester), feasting (or
rather attempting to) in a Flemish interior (The Wooden Spoon), standing
in a damp cave with a paintbrush in hand (The Grotto), carrying a message
in the street (The Messenger) or hidden behind a wall of ginkgo biloba
leaves (Blush). She is proud or overwhelmed, weeping or focused on a
task—even crucified.
This omnipresent figure shouldn’t be viewed as a character switching
between costumes or settings, returning from one season to the next to
parade before our eyes. Emily Mae Smith’s paintings work on a symbolic,
rather than narrative level. Her images evoke mythology, still life, and even
those lovely allegories so common among Belle Epoque masters. Unlike
Baldessari’s mocking message circa 1968 (“no ideas have entered this
work” proclaimed of one his paintings1 at the time), the images here are
loaded with ideas, values and symbols.

The story of Mary Tillman Smith is that of a poor child from Mississippi who, in the twilight of her life, began work that was admired very early on by Basquiat, and that now features in the collections of the most prestigious museums, including the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the National Gallery of Art (Washington), the High Museum of American Art (Atlanta), the Smithsonian Museum (Washington), and the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris).

We are pleased to present Guillaume Pinard’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

“La rue des mésanges” is the name given to this new set of large-format paintings, which Guillaume Pinard produced this summer, and which he will exhibit from October 16 to November 28, 2021.
In parallel to this exhibition, he will present “Pour Salir le Perron” at the Telmah contemporary art gallery, in Rouen, from October 15 to December 18, 2021.

I grew up in a Tits Street.

Do not look for Tits street in inner Paris, there is none. For that matter there is none in Lyon downtown, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, etc.

Tits streets appeared à the end of the sixties, along the development of private housing estates in the suburbs of big cities. A Tits Street is a street without a history, with no link with the area where it stands. Very often associated with other passerines (bullfinches, goldfinches, warblers Streets, etc.) in a “birds estate”, this urban graft purposely promises its owners something bucolic; a street which pretends the mineralization of the land to be a rural project, and its ballasts earth to be humus, with Jardiland or Truffaut, dealers of biologic diversity on the way to work, in order to make one’s patch of garden a piece of nature.

I have been caught out on this dream, this zoning of an imaginative world, using a strictly market and implement language, where nothing puts out roots (an accessory, a tool, a machine for each gesture, each trip, a shop sign for each function). It is this franchised dream, this street even left a long time ago, that I am still fighting with and against, from where I speak, draw and paint this infected prettiness, this glut of landscape, the chained up bodies, a second hand colored-print trade.

Guillaume Pinard, 2021

The Heart of the matter

Warsaw to Paris. It would be a one-way ticket for Emanuel Proweller, my father, to Gare de l’Est, where he arrived, stateless, with no belongings, with his wife and child. The war deprived him of his youth, stole his identity and reduced his world and family to ashes. [...] Having overcome innumerable obstacles, he explained that “vitality is made in such a way that you immediately embrace the colours of your new soil.”

[...] When Proweller painted, he invited all his senses along to sing “The colour of the seasons”. He never ceased to express his gratitude to life. There was no art without spirituality. He painted like others pray. Each brushstroke celebrated his unwavering belief in humanity. Whether it was abstract or figurative, any object, however modest, was worthy of being looked at and magnifi ed, given symbolic status. Whether it was a bottle, a coffee grinder or a candlestick, they were all part of his personal “mythologie quotidienne”, before its time. Colour was his credo, whereas his contemporaries were sounding the death knell for painting and creating installations.

[...] After the hell that was the Holocaust, Proweller regained his place as the subject and was no longer the object of persecution. However, it was through painting that he acquired in his own eyes his legitimacy as a survivor, with this “I” that acts as the subject of the verb to paint. “Me, Proweller, painter”. He was the main subject.

He also claimed the right to the pictorial subject. In 1948, a newly arrived refugee from Poland, he painted the “Bâton de Moïse”. Renamed “La Canne” at his first exhibition for Colette Allendy, this walking stick guided him, as did his humanist faith, through arid journeys across the desert, leading him to his Promised Land, a new form of figuration.

[...] Proweller came through the black and white. For him, the “black spot” at the end of the line was the beginning of the route towards figuration and colour beyond geometric abstraction. In this way he managed to rehumanise the world.

[...] As a dead painter, he has the benefit of another life and continues to live on in his works. While they were painted in the last century, they still speak, and more and more so, to men and women today. At each retrospective or exhibition, his work surprises with its vitality, freshness and relevance. And this miracle will happily occur once again within the walls of the Galerie Vallois.

When [Emanuel Proweller] was finishing a painting, stood in front of his easel, it was only finished when he finally murmured: “It is breathing.”

Elisabeth Brami-Proweller,
excerpts from the exhibition catalogue
published at Éditions Courtes et Longues

You have travelled through a mirror, to the other side of things. Yet, not somewhere else. See, not everything is unknown and some fi gures are even familiar. Expect to feel things that were once shapeless. Lucie Picandet has created them, alone, last Spring, while time had stopped. In her paintings we see worlds blossoming under bell-jars; among them, hybrid beings that seem to be the result of a union between two species, suspended clothing inhabited by absent bodies, interference and most probably some inconsistencies. The fi rst of them is perhaps that Lucie Picandet wants to represent what cannot be represented while accepting to mourn the visible.

The artist explores this paradox through two enigmatic experiences. First, she is interested in esoterism that plunges the people who are confronted with it into interstitial worlds that science still struggles to explain. During these periods of time, their senses greatly increase. Their emotions take shape, they let themselves be touched before escaping as reason returns to them. Then the artist discovers the Tibetan Book of the Dead which describes the path of physically dead beings: forty-seven days during which their consciousness tries to pass through various stages in the hope of reaching Nirvana. It is then a question of fluidifying one’s vision of the world in order to extricate oneself from the cycle of reincarnations, to abandon all judgments and with it, a part of oneself.

Lucie Picandet is a painter, but in the end her gaze never ceases to rest on what cannot be seen. While she studied theology, the question of the materiality of belief already animated her. When she moved to the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, the artist developed a richer inner life, giving rise to a new passion for mystical experiences and their stories.

Today, she wants, even more, to materialize feelings and abstractions. Her paintings have thus become open doors to those mental spaces in which worlds in gestation in bubbles are topped by hybrid beasts with ambitions that are too little clear. They demand a refl exive plasticity but are also refuges for those who suffer from solitude. Lucie Picandet plays with codes and semantic. She can be inspired by orthodox icons or by the agents of contemporary imagination that are the influencers of social networks. Here, the contours of the invisible are shaped as if it were a palpable object and things once tangible slide at will from one form to another. The boundaries between the real and the immaterial, the rational and the mystical are challenged, laid down on canvas and diluted in the oil that the artist uses for the first time in her work. So much so that it seems that Lucie Picandet sees through worlds.

The text below by Barbara Hess entitled «Hommage to the Spray Gun» is an excellent introduction to his works.

„Everything folds in its own way, the rope and the stick, but also the colors that are distributed according to the concavity and convexity of the luminous ray, and the sounds, all the more acute as the trembling parts are shorter and more tense.“
Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque, Paris 1988

In the field of music a suite is an order of pieces with a common programmatic theme. Under the title of the exhibition Suite for Spray Gun Thomas Zitzwitz brings together a series of paintings that were made using a spray gun – a technical tool, which is normally used in industry for the application of lacquers. The other common point of exponates is that the color is painted on a canvas irregularly folded. Only after the canvas is mounted on a canvas.

The process of Spray Paintings can be characterized by a directed chance, since the result of this process, which is of a directed part and another random part, is only visible when the canvas becomes a flat surface mounted on a chassis – similar to the material of a film, which must be chemically developed after exposure.  First of all, with the help of adhesive tapes, we define an area on the coated or raw canvas spread on the floor. Then the artist prepares this one, in a way like a piano by John Cage, by manipulating the fabric and from time to time placing objects under the canvas to design draperies. The surface thus prepared is treated with the spray gun – monochrome or polychrome – on all sides, to such an extent that the parts which are behind a crest and which are not affected by the paint mist remain empty, as the color becomes more pronounced on other parts, and where the absorption capacity of the canvas is exhausted, lakes of colors are formed.

The association of a landscape in relief unites some Spray Paintings with compositions of Abstract Expressionism such as the monumental Mountain and Sea (1952) by Helen Frankenthaler – an effect, which is countered in some works by bands painted on the edges of the image field, which disturbs the spatial effect and which instead emphasizes the very process of painting.

It goes without saying that Thomas Zitzwitz is not the first artist in the history of painting who experiments with folding. Clearly in the discourse of painting after Modernism there is no longer any question of originality or authenticity but of a relationship of difference and productive divergence. The title Suite for Spray Gun is also understood as a reference to the Hungarian exile Simon Hantaï (1922 – 2008) who is a historical representative of folding.

In 1948 Hantaï left as an art student the territory of Socialist Realism and settled in Paris, the world capital of art of that time. There, between 1969 and 1973, was born his group of works Etudes (in music a designation for a musical composition written to serve to exercise the skill of the executant): All over large format executed on canvases folded several times, where the light, unpainted parts evoke an interlacing of bamboo leaves on a monochrome background.

Notably Thomas Zitzwitz’s Spray or Crumple Paintings mark a difference in his own artistic practice. In the second part of the 90s he had realized installations of video, sound and odors. Towards the end of this Decade he concentrated more and more on the paint by using interference pigments, which are applied using a scraper in a transparent acrylic gel. The light- and color-saturated surfaces of these paintings, which are often separated by exact horizontal edges into two or three differently structured parts, change their colors according to the viewer’s

point of view and the light situation. Their hybrid and atmospheric character – which is not only chromatically unstable, but also changes between the type of painting and object – was more evident in 2007 in the artist’s book Moleskine Orangée. There the confrontation with Kodachrome photos dating from the artist’s childhood in the South of France transformed the vivid paintings into abstract images of memory.

A little later, in early 2008, Thomas Zitzwitz started working on the first Spray Paintings: It was also a deliberate change of the shiny and thicker surface“paint with pigments interfering with a more formal and less associative image effect”, as he formulated in his e-mail communication with American artist David Reed.

The relationship to the film mentioned at the beginning is for the Spray Paintings – whose visual appearance develops “only by straightening on the chassis – still significant in other respects. One of their most remarkable qualities is their illusionist and almost phototoréalist depth, since the three-dimensional aspect of the folding is preserved as a trace in the color applied on the canvas stretched. In fact, we can refer to them – like the images of photography or film – with the philosopher Charles S. Pierce as “indexical”.

Because between the spatial arrangement of the canvas on the floor of the studio and the visual appearance of the Spray Paintings as a two-dimensional painting exists a relationship of physical causality – similarly as in the association between the photographed object and its photographic image or cinematographic.Since bending is a transitional form between continuity and rupture – which, as Deleuze writes, is appropriate to divide differences, incompossibilities, disagreements, dissonances […] into as many possible worlds“– The Spray Paintings by Thomas Zitzwitz constantly change between illusionism and self-reference: a moment of instability and ambiguity, which remains essential for his pictorial approach.

Might Pierre Moignard be one of those extraordinary, derisory utopians still capable of halting the advance of an army of tanks?

As a barrage to the high-speed stream of pictures flooding us today, he raises the fragile breakwater of hiswry images. To the riders of waves and currents, he prefers the humble heroism of the beaver and builders of castles in the sand.

The words spoken by Julian the Apostate (taken from Ibsen’s play Emperor and Galilean) that open his latest film (Holyland Experience)—“The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is no longer true”—unlock the meaning of his works.

The notion of “dialectical images” (in its complexity) provides a fair glimpse into the nature of Pierre Moignard’s works. Created consistently according to a principle of contradiction…(1)

Fiercely demanding of himself, Moignard has broadened and refined his artistic pantheon over the years. Guston, Titian, de Kooning, Goya, and, recently, Picasso, have inspired series of composite paintings; observing that the finest works of these “beacons” had drawn on their social observations or political beliefs, Moignard, from art’s ivory tower, was soon carving out the same niches… (2)

He has worked on numerous series of wide – and close- shot compositions, which increasingly and openly reference cinema. Several stays in Los Angeles and the discovery of Las Vegas forged connections between his painting and film set design, to the extent that he has had several of his paintings made by set designers. In these borderline works, painting seems to “forget itself” in cinema; the painter becomes apainter- filmmaker, recording the “forgetting” of painting…Yet if one records this forgetting, one can then remember and perhaps attain real life.” By way of cinema, the painter shows us images of forgetting, thereby putting us in touch with reality.(3)

A certain geometry in action is enough for him. This is what he has meticulously constructed in his paintings, period after period, driven by a need to go as far as possible and well beyond what might be said about it. In all these years, he has continued along his path as a painter, while I continue to accompany him,but nothing of what was already there at the very beginning—that is, everything—has disappeared. The painting existed then and still exists solely in its own presence.(4)

As we have seen, while Moignard’s works are produced using very different means and forms of artistry, itis never a question of style. The painter is convinced that he has something more intense than an author’s sole endeavor, and that this something is on the outside.

And so to take something that is already made or already there is not to quote; it is to invent other lives that are of interest only in so far as they open up a kind of window on the reality outside the painting. With Manet, Moignard tries to show us that “art is the expression of life.” And we share his belief that, in art, the imagination reinvents the ever-renewed conditions of this open window. The challenge for painting is not to confine it to its quality as a medium to be practiced to achieve a style. Or, worse, to limit it to uses that envision it as nothing other than a vehicle for the “storm of images” among others.(5)

(1) Didier Ottinger, Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre de Création Industrielle, Paris , « In thesea of images », Ibid.

(2) Didier Ottinger, « Pierre Moignard, At the round about of history », Ibid.

(3) Catherine Grenier, Director of the Fondation Giacometti, Paris, « Pierre Moignard : The forgetting of painting », Ibid.

(4) Fabrice Hergott, Director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, « A geometry in action », Ibid.

(5) Véronique Giroud, Doctor and Professor of History of Art, « Ecstasy as such », Ibid.

Françoise Pétrovitch once told me she liked her works best during the process of their creation, going against the principle that a soup should be left to cool a little before being consumed. Immediately executed to be immediately relished. Painting carried out in single strokes, without pentimento, alterations or laborious superimpositions, gliding across the support with the ease of a practiced hand. Françoise Pétrovitch’s technique is that of a master craftswoman, a hand that knows its tools and medium. This manual fluidity is reiterated from one work to another, with each oeuvre enjoying her accomplished touch with renewed relish. While observing this fluid pleasure, one forgets that Françoise Pétrovitch was schooled in engraving, the art of scraping and etching, where the tools penetrate the medium rather than gliding across it. As if painting with ink or oil was a release, a relaxation of the tension felt by the engraver’s hand. “I work with the adventures that ink produces, not against them as might be the case with engraving.”

With her background in applied arts, the artist pays particular attention to technical expertise. She exploits the specificities of each medium, while transposing and adapting processes from one to another. Her work on canvas incorporates effects from her oeuvre on paper, such as the use of reserved space that is materialized using white paint. On paper this reserve might act as a drawing or a contour and the border between painted spaces and this unpainted reserve is an impassable frontier. It is in the mastery of these reserves that her practiced hand stands out, creating images made up of blank space within her colors, such as the children, whose skeletons and bone structures appear as reserves of white inside the washes. In the same way, in the figure of the Fumeur, all the iconographic interest lies in the formal effect of the smoke that traverses and fractures the face in a flash of white. Within this fluid painting, the reserve is the part that is solid, fixed and immobile, enclosing or enclosed by the liquid, moving washes of ink. One never really knows if it is the reserve that limits the expanse of the ink or the ink that determines the spaces left untouched.

In the oil paintings recently completed in the studio at Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy, the whites constitute the densest areas of her works, as with Lucie (2020) and Aveuglé (2020), where the opacity of the white is reinforced by the hands that mask the faces, annihilating any individuality. There are no portraits in Françoise Pétrovitch’s oeuvre (even in the case of Lucie, which depicts the artist’s daughter). These portraits-that-are-not show faces that are obscured by opaque lead-white hands. Red outlines, typical of the artist’s work over the past fifteen years, intrude on the white surfaces, delineating hands and faces. This can also be seen in the series of insects, inspired by the pseudo-scientific  paintings that have punctuated the history of art. Adopting uncharacteristically small formats, Françoise Pétrovitch leaves the world of humans, birds and mammals behind to invest that of insects and thus introduce the world of plants to which they are organically and mimetically close.

Faithful to ink and paper, Pétrovitch nevertheless defies their limits by enlarging formats to the scale of paintings on canvas or even mural paintings, where the drawing is carried out on an unlimited white surface. A formal amplification accompanies this enlargement of the support. Avoiding any concentrations, these larger formats amplify the fluidity of the ink, in a universe without horizon or depth. Françoise Pétrovitch’s work plays with painting effects but not in a spectacular manner. There is no behind-the-scenes nor backdrop to her work. Everything is visible. The veils formed by paint or ink can be lifted, enhancing the transparency of painting that hides nothing, not even the anxiety dissolved in her manual virtuosity.

Text by Choghakate Kazarian