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.

Opposite to the Musée de l’Orangerie you will find Jeu de Paume

The museum displays exhibits of contemporary and international artists, and currently contains over 1000 works by 300 artists. Its collections include monumental works such as The Monument to Language by James Lee Byars, Caterpillar by Wim Delvoye, Backyard by Liza Lou, La Volière (The Aviary) by Jean-Pierre Raynaud, and Everything that Rises Must Converge by Sarah Sze; works by contemporary French artists including Vincent Beaurin, Gérard Garouste, Raymond Hains, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Alain Séchas, Pierrick Sorin, Jean Giraud; and works by foreign artists including James Coleman (Ireland), Thomas Demand (Germany), Alair Gomes (Brazil), William Kentridge (South Africa), Bodys Isek Kingelez (the Congo), Guillermo Kuitca (Argentina), Yukio Nakagawa (Japan), Huang Yong Ping (China), and Damian Pettigrew (Canada).

The museum’s collection, believed to be a combination of works owned by LVMH and Bernard Arnault, include works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gilbert & George and Jeff Koons.For site-specific installations, the foundation commissioned works by Ellsworth Kelly, Olafur Eliasson, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (starring Scott Tixier and Tony Tixier), Sarah Morris, Taryn Simon, Cerith Wyn Evans and Adrián Villar Rojas.

A group exhibition with:
Cécile Bart, Eric Baudart, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Antoine Donzeaud, Stephen Felton, Dominique
Ghesquière, Laurent Grasso, George Henry Longly, Nicolas Moulin, Patrick Saytour

Curator: Frédérique Valentin

The term « political failure » designates a government action that is doomed to failure. This term highlights the intentional dimension and the extent to which objective reality opposes it. A group exhibition’s inability to re-transcribe a work’s whole meaning jeopardizes the very principle of group exhibitions, whose purpose, however, is paradoxically to clarify the work’s meaning. Group exhibitions are based on the principle of placing works in perspective in light of other works. It goes beyond its original meaning, raises questions about both form and meaning, in order to ultimately reaffirm that every form of discourse that attempts to totally circumscribe an artist’s work is doomed to failure in the face of its surrounding context.
“Political Failure” takes analogies of form and meaning as its point of departure, grouping works according to three “notions”: Projection (Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Cécile Bart, Laurent Grasso, Nicolas Moulin), Sign (George Henry Longly, Patrick Saytour), Matter (Eric Baudart, Antoine Donzeaud, Dominique Ghesquière).
Through these three worlds, the exhibition traces an interpretive perspective on the works that goes beyond the original meaning offered and, by placing them back in a “shifted” perspective, displaces their meaning to the advantage of a reinterpretation extending beyond the question of the medium.

For Soto, colour is experienced in and for itself only in the real time and space of perception. The term “chronochrome” is used less in its original sense (it was a process for making colour films, invented in 1912) than to describe the kinetic exploration of the monochrome. Soto was a close friend of Yves Klein, but in Soto’s work, pure colour leaves the stable support of the surface in order to become a vibratory phenomenon.

Jesús Rafael Soto was born in Venezuela in 1923. He trained at art school in Caracas and came to Paris in 1950, which remained his base for the rest of his life.

Matthieu Poirier holds a doctorate in art history from the Sorbonne, where he has also taught. Formerly a resident at Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, he recently curated or co-curated « Post-Op » at Galerie Perrotin (2014), « Dynamo » at Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais and « Julio Le Parc » at Palais de Tokyo (2013).
On the occasion of the exhibition a 170 page catalogue will be published, with texts by Matthieu Poirier and Jean Clay.