A dozen years later, invited by Anne Barrault to create a different form of narrative in her gallery, David B. resumed his research on his brother, whose health was deteriorating. He wanted to “draw something that would represent all [his] brother’s crises one by one, drawing them one after the other”[1]. Spread over 72 drawings, the exhibition “Mon Frère et le roi du monde” (My Brother and the King of the World) confronts 36 portraits of his brother with 36 portraits of the “King of the World” (created by René Guénon in an eponymous book). These two walls of 36 drawings create links between the works in a variety of ways. They blur the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong, today and yesterday, inside and outside.

Haunted by the recent death of his brother at the end of 2023, David B. has embarked on a new series of drawings about his sibling. “It’s what comes naturally to me, the desire to draw him, what he was, what he did, what he didn’t do. To bring him to life, in a way.”[1] These vivid recent memories from the last night David B. spent with his brother are marked by a spoken and sung monologue, incomprehensible – like a luminous and serene agony. Unanswered questions remain about how his older brother, gradually deprived of part of his memory and the use of a language, might feel. In these drawings, it is his brother’s body that takes centre stage. “The body is very important because my brother’s body has been very much affected. His illness, his epileptic seizures and the fact that he fell and hurt himself.” A body damaged by falls and medication, dislocated from the inside, fragmented, losing its usual connections. This “brother in pieces” that David B. draws, he has “often seen it as if each fall shattered a piece of him”. But it’s also a body that reads, attached to words – those in his mother’s books, those he speaks, and the new language he creates. A triptych deals with “The invention of writing”, and letters emerge from bodies.

David B. has lived in Bologna for several years, where he produced this series of drawings. He uses and mixes ink, gouache, acrylic and pencil, in his favourite black, white and grey palette. He paints and draws on a variety of papers, some of which have been salvaged and cut to the 30 x 40 cm format (that of the comic strips, and of what can be easily transported): it’s a question of adapting to their absorption and dilution capacities. These drawings are developed over a long period of time, even though the project is laid out in advance, in a notebook, in the form of a rough matrix. The future drawings are sketched boxes with titles; “often I start with the title, and I find a drawing that corresponds to a title”. There are several titles per page, and you can navigate through this notebook like in a gallery of paintings, or like in a slightly abstract storyboard, where reading the titles builds an enigmatic story. David B. cultivates the need to let himself be guided by the creative process, doing touch-ups, if necessary, that gradually come together: “I do everything directly on the final page, which doesn’t mean I work quickly, I think a lot. If it doesn’t work, I erase it and come back to it. I paint over it. It’s hardly surprising, then, to find in his current acquaintances two important figures of the surrealist movement, the French painter André Masson (whom he rediscovered as told by Michel Leiris), and the Italian writer, painter and brother of Georgio Di Chirico, Alberto Savinio. Here words and singular works of art, some of them little-known, come together to build worlds out of things that don’t exist together. David B. draws us into this revelation of the invisible through his ability to transcribe an imaginary world of incredible fertility, tainted of tragedy.

Camille de Singly
April 2024

Tiziana La Melia will present paintings whose shapes are inspired by the house, a square topped by a triangle to symbolize the roof. As she explains, her family came from Italy and settled in Canada. Arriving in a foreign country, the need to find a place where to live and put down roots was vital. For Tiziana La Melia, this need was also tinged with an ambivalent feeling. The house can be a refuge, but can also become the place of female confinement. She remembers her grandmother in Italy, obliged to assume her role as a “housewife”. When the house becomes the only center of a woman, whom society describes as a “housewife”.

Dolores Hayden has dedicated a book to “ the first American women who have identified the economic exploitation of female domestic work by men as being at the root of inequality between the sexes*.

Stéphanie Saadé will present House Plan. Here the artist, with sand paper has removed a trace of paint in each of the rooms, which make up her apartment. Once used, the sandpaper forms the plan of her flat. Paradoxically with her attempt to reproduce her place of living by cutting this abrasive piece of paper, Stéphanie Saadé speaks to us of exile and displacement.

To come and touch, to rub the walls in order to smell the space, understand it, listen to its history, but also leave a trace before a new departure. As Emmanuele Coccia explains in his book “la Philosophie de la maison”, we occupy places that have been inhabited by people we have not known, and in turn, we will leave these spaces to other newcomers.

Jochen Gerner will present the pages of an Ikea catalogue he has completely recovered, removing every furniture and objects and only leaving visible the architecture of the room.

The catalogue is organized by room: Living room, Dining-room, Working-room, Sleeping-room… each moment of the day and night corresponds to a room. We are invited to stroll in our homes according to the time of the day. Does human being shape space, or does space shape  human being?

In his book Espèce d’espaces, Georges Perec proposes, “ a division based not on circadian rhythms but on heptadian ones:  this would give us apartments of seven rooms, respectively called: Monroom, tuesroom, wenesroom, thursroom, friroom and sunroom.”

Bertrand Dezoteux’s En attendant Mars is modeled on Mars 500, a Russian experimental capsular life simulation program launched in 2010. The aim was to reproduce, for 520 days, – the duration of a round-trip flight to Mars- the life conditions of a crew in a strangely wainscoted tight space, in order to measure the physical and psychological repercussions of such a flight. En attendant Mars re-enacts fragments of this simulated spatial life.

Berger&Berger will present a selection of advertisements from French, German and Italian Architecture magazines, in the sixties to the eighties. They examine the History of the presence of advertisements in architecture magazines and the place of woman, of the objectivized body and of the picture of the architect in contemporary advertising. These images build the idea of an ideal house.

Katharina Bosse will present a photograph entitled Dean Martin Room.Is it an advert for an interior, a sofa or a lamp? None of that. In the nineties, the artist made a series of photographs entitled “Realms of Signs, Realms of Senses” in which she photographed rooms in hotels where no one under 18 was allowed. These places offer various surroundings, from a prison to a boudoir or an operating room. So architecture becomes an object of fantasy.

Jagdeep Raina, a Canadian artist of Kashmir origin, mainly does embroidery. A way, for him, to reconnect with his origins. He takes up a female practice intimately linked to the interior of home. But here, there is no longer a home. Since 1947 Kashmir has been quartered in three countries: India, Pakistan and China. In his works, he creates imageries, which allows a phantasmagorical recovery of this place through transmission belief, creation and love.

*La grande révolution domestique, une histoire de l’architecture féministe” by Dolores Hayden, published in France in 2023, ((1982 in the United State

The plurality of history is a main subject of Jagdeep Raina’s works. His family, from the Kashmir region bordering the Punjab, emigrated to Canada in the ‘60s due to the unstable political climate following the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The departure of the British authorities from the region led to its violent division into two independent nation-states, along with huge displacements of people on both sides of the new borders and beyond.

With his interest in various textile techniques (Kashmir and Punjab embroidery, shawls, phulkari) Raina reconnects with and revives an ancestral heritage, which nears disappearance today. Additionally, the techniques of textile arts have long been activities practiced by women, and they are still very gendered. This reorganization of historical configurations shows Raina’s wish to question repressive orders, while revealing the divisional hierarchy at work with gender, class, caste, race, sexuality and geography. Raina’s practice therefore implies tradition and transgression in equal measure. In creating his works, he draws inspiration from historical and informal photographic sources he finds or produces himself. With fluid and malleable materials like embroidered tapestry, writing, drawing, ceramics, animated videos, and more recently 35mm film, he uses reproduction and reappropriation strategies to disrupt the archives of permanence. Raina questions the intimate relationships between personal and public archives, emphasizing that which links us to history, to understand narratives that are beyond us.

For his first exhibition in France, Raina wishes to confront the country with its orientalist and colonialist past. The Kashmir shawl, brought back from the Egyptian campaign by French soldiers in 1798, became Josephine de Beauharnais’s favorite toilet requisite, then Marie-Louise of Austria’s, as well as Madame Rivière’s, whose portrait by Ingres in 1805 features one of these shawls in the foreground. The Kashmir shawl became a luxury item of clothing and was in fashion for most of the 19th century, until the trend decreased and left the workers of the region without resources. If Raina wants to refer to the violent modes of the exploitation and commercialization exerted by France at the time of the production of the fabrics of the day, he also sets up some kind of resistance. In a series of six drawings composed with a quilting technique, one can notice a Kashmiri woman entering a Kashmir textile store to have a hand-sewn, woven and embroidered coat fitted. She is seen posing while laughing warmly with the saleswomen. This scene does not depict a specific place or moment but rather has the effect of a dream. This fantasy is powerful, because it creates an inversion by suggesting an alternative scenario in favor of those who have been exploited and abused. The re-appropriation of the traditional Kashmiri garment as an item of costume and protection is part of this metaphorical reconquest of the territory, which is a recurring and moving theme in the artist’s work.

Elsa Delage

__________

“On foot” is also the way the paintings gathered for this exhibition in gallery Anne Barrault space were made. The shapes on their surfaces were inscribed on foot. Whether they are drawings, footprints or colored stretches, they all emerge from an accumulation of traces left during performances while the paintings are still lying on the floor. During these sessions, sequences of endlessly repeated actions are performed in the paint. Whatever these movements or their circumstances, from a simple step to a more complete operating chain, they can be executed by anyone, without know-how, as long as you are endowed with a phenotype conforming to Homo sapiens standards. None of these movements is expressive, because none is intended to mean anything whatsoever. They are rather traces mapping the various motor skills from a purely functional point of view. This mapping is then inscribed in the last visible traces on the surface of the shapes by a pictorial process through which the movement is literalized in the form of vectored segments.

These lines outlined in the paint write the patterns of the actions, which cross the paintings and are engraved in their general movement, like a skeleton shown through the shape, or fossilized gestures in their environment.

The latter paintings are in the continuity of DF’s pictorial practice. In a debate, he declared: “I have never done anything else but going back to traces. For me, painting, inscribing shapes on a surface, is always done with going back, reusing traces previously left there, as well on the surface of the inscription as persistent in my memory in the shape of mnesical traces. Most of the time, it is a question of erasing them, masking them, of reusing them, of translating, hiding and guising them, in short: of recovering them.”

By following the track of the movements left in the traces, he transcribes simple functional gestures into a writing system, and thus tries to hold symbolism and locomotion together by mixing one into the other, without ever opposing them or taking them back to the well-known conceptual limits distinguishing nature and culture.

“Inflation is for me an economic and affective account, specific to a country. This economic phenomenon governs the Argentinean way of life. It is intrinsically linked with the relationship of the country with the debt and the United States. I can say that inflation is our national madness, it is quite fierce. It creates a complex way of thinking, with its own consequences in time, and its own narrative of our history and of our future” .
Liv Schulman

Dear Liv,

I send you this mail to let you know I am not sure I am able to write the press release about your exhibition The New Inflation at gallery Anne Barrault. I do understand that the deadline for the text was 10 days ago.

I am really sorry to let you down. We have just discussed the phenomenon, the extreme volatility of promises. My attention is distracted, projects pile up, as well as hindrances. We have talked about the way the difficulties we may meet shape our projects, how the invitation, production and exhibition contexts are as important as the art piece itself, how we must learn and relearn to make works differently in a faulty and hostile environment. You like it when I speak of our faulty and hostile milieu, and I like it when you say: “That’s it!”

However I have noted a few things, and thought about possibilities for your text. Here they are, if you wish to pass them on to someone who would take over the mission (if it is not already too late). It is the least, but also the best I can do. The talk we had together was intense. I did love the way you talked about the film, the exhibition, the genesis of the project, its transformation, the 2001 economic crisis in Argentina, imperialism, colonialism, peso and dollar, inflation, red lining, the Duke of Orleans and his 1721 titles for the future, dying Omaha art center, Warren Buffet who finances the area with cows and soya, endless cancelled flights, the ignored queer love story, the fact you thought of having a residence in Chicago and not in Omaha and making a performance and not a film, social injustice, the black holes among us when we discuss organ transplants, the expanding universe at the root of the Big Bang, and the privatization of every thing. It was an expanding conversation, an inflation of information, ideas, and details, everything was perfectly connected, it was clear, I should have recorded it!

Here are random notes:
The FOMO and FIMO puppets must definitely be mentioned, never mind the spoilers! Fear Of Missing Out and Fear In Moving On (by the way, are you sure it is correct in English?). They haunt me, I think they are the key of the film, or the escape route?
Don’t forget to describe the space of the gallery, the floor covered with large wooden boards with holes, the gallery windows obstructed with plywood, which reminds one of the time of the shops protecting themselves from the yellow vests demonstrations. The fact that the film can be seen from the street through the holes in the plywood. I wonder if a film is not better seen, when you have to get over an obstacle to see it; you concentrate on it. Is it the idea of the holes? Attention in dispersion. The clothes have also holes. You talked of pieces lacking understanding in the work, which create new narratives, didn’t you?

I think it is worth mentioning the story of the Twin Peaks credit titles, how Angelo Badalamenti composed the credits music by adding notes or a group of notes as Lynch described the scenes to him, and how Sylvie Fortin, the curator of the Bemis Art Center, did the same by gradually adding elements to the proposition; a performance; in three acts; on economy, with local actresses and actors, and how you accepted each addition and completed the score.

I quite like the list of the film actresses and actors and the characters:)I do not have the list of the actors, but I have that of the characters: Myneeds, Rockbottom, Flaw, Wrong, Best Intentions.

It is I in this list. It is a composite model of myself, the score of my difficulties, my inability, my desires, and eventually the fact I have left you stranded. Apparently, you had foreseen it! These characters cohabit in the film, as they cohabit in us, because you compose a complex and diverse experience rather than a one-dimensional and normative one.

That’s it!

I am really sorry, you know.

Sorry

Phoenix

*Phoenix Atala is  a queer Franco-Maroccan artist. After being the third member of “le Grand Magasin” in the 2000s,  he continues, semi solo, with his activities of experimental deconstruction by making films, video games and performances. Since 2019 he teaches at “ebabx and is in residence at “Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers” for the project “Défaillance Critique”.

Anne Barrault Gallery is very pleased to present the first exhibition of Marie Losier in her space.
The exhibition will premiere an entirely new set of works with films, installations and drawings.

Marie Losier’s artistic universe is built around friends, family and idols she summons in a crazy maelstrom. Mainly known for her work behind the camera (a Bolex 16mm wound every 30 seconds), the artist, for some years now, has exhibited monotypes and installations connected with her films.

Her imagery is inspired by the figures of the New York underground and experimental cinema of the Kuchar brothers to Paul Sharits, as well as by her accomplice Tony Conrad, and her new French friends Yann Gonzalez, Bertrand Mandico. She formed a part of this brotherhood during her years in New York. Others, like Felix Kubin, will come, thanks to her travels and her projects when back in Europe. They all are good times or bad times companions, faithful friends and the partners of a constantly changing and reconsidered art, which evokes Méliès as well as the clips on MTV and the beat poetry, the camp universe, Fluxus or video art and low fi.

Eyes are seen from the street; you are theatrically invited to pass through the colorful curtain in order to discover the effervescence sweeping through the the gallery.  On one of the walls, the powerful and moving black and white drawing of a headless woman with animal feet, a hybrid character: inside her, she carries cameras, she brings to life a film, which will be animated through an eagle’s legged projector.
The film is in color and an animation of faces and color strobe light.  It is a portrait, a melting pot of faces, which unreel successively to form just one. Farther, a few seconds long loops of images are shown in decorated boxes. These videos, reruns of the artist’s films, drawn from her rushes, give a new life to the protagonists in an overflowing and baroque showcase, like magic lanterns, which remind you of the beginnings of the cinema.

Her friends are the models of the large black oil portraits the artist has always made on rice paper. From this sometimes cranky everyday life some gravity rises. Whereas delicacy and precision relate to the direct and precise way Marie films, close but not intrusive, the fragility of the act is found in the eyes, a more solemn counter-point to the whole work. These monotypes texture remind of film celluloid, and has the same magic of motion.

For her first exhibition at the gallery, the artist invites new stories, goes a little further in the drawings and the line, and entwines bestiary, fun fair, the birth of cinema and vanilla cream cake.

Marie Losier mingles, like North American artists know so well how to, her personal life with her work, into a euphoric and generous self-fiction. Her works depict a big and happy house, from which the parents would be away, leaving excited, full of imagination children, who burst out laughing while playing grown-ups. They build huts and flying saucers, dress up and paint their faces, cook, eat, laugh, sing and jump everywhere. They wear flowery bathing caps, octopuses and birds by way of headgear, they throw golden flakes, and, above all, they never forget to dance.

Emilie Flory
October 2019

Williams’ methodic way of painting references a variety of painterly traditions, but his works always share a mark or stain in red, blue, yellow or grey, paint marks or accidental splashes or spillages that he finds in particular places.
In the case of Thomas Paine, the traces of his symbolic presence remained elusive for longer than most of Williams’ subjects. The artist saw this as normal, paralleling numerous Paine scholars or fanatics who travelled extensively searching for the dispersed remains of the great man. An accidental and evocative paint mark was finally discovered on Paine’s doorstep in Lewes, the British town, where he first began political debate in earnest.

(1) The nameplate on Thomas Paine’s house, 10 rue de l’Odéon, Paris

The Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation hosts Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck’s archives. The collection is made-up of vintage prints, contact sheets, drawings, publications, correspondences, rare books, albums, films, videos, posters, invitations, etc.. It is located on the Foundation’s lower-level, in a space specifically conceived in accordance with museographical conservation standards.