Galleries in Paris » rue des arquebusiers

FANUELE – POLARIS

Galleries — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 15:25:18 +0000

In the principle of the last works of Vanessa Fanuele, a window. The one in front of which, walking through the Villa Malaparte, she will be struck down: that famous hole in the wall in front of the author’s office where, under the effect of the frame, a portion of the Mediterranean panorama is suddenly organized as a historia. The window – and likewise the canvas -, place of appearance of the image proposing only a view by essence distanced and fragmentary of the world. It is from this dialectic between opening and border, between perspective and screen that his recent paintings proceed. Her taste for landscapes had already led her to explore this very particular expression of the genre, the veduta – classical painting of urban views aiming at imitating, for memento, the high places of the Grand Tour. The previous series of Ultras is explicitly in this register. Vanessa Fanuele depicts a series of photographs taken from old magazines and faded Polaroids, compiling emblematic buildings of modern architecture – those of Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, as many souvenirs borrowed from her imaginary museum. With this difference however: where the representative and descriptive intentions prevailed for the vedutists, she does not bother with any fidelity to the optical perception. On the contrary, it questions it. ( extract from the text « Le ciel est plus loin » from Marion Delage de Luget )

van Lunen – Polaris

Galleries — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 16:05:27 +0000

This enfant terrible of ceramics, exhibits her new series …all about curtains at the Polaris gallery until May 21.

It is through sculpture that Clemence van Lunen comes to art, trained in the studio of Etienne Martin at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris, she made her first ceramics in 2004, a medium she will never leave, having become for her a material of formal investigation.

After the exhibition Chinese Landscape in 2010, which closed several journeys in China, Wicked Flowers, in 2013, about Bricks and Flowers in 2016, and her series on cactus, in 2019 Clémence van Lunen continues to develop a singular universe. Often referring to obsolete forms, (bouquets of flowers) or anodyne (vases) or utilitarian , Clémence van Lunen seeks rather what « escapes » the tradition, and and it is perhaps by this escape, often incongruous and insolent that each one can apprehend her work. Her latest series presented here under the title …all about curtains is inspired by the object of the the curtain, the utilitarian object, that we forget but which in addition to its many functions, impassioned the artist, by its movements, its curves, its flights, its arabesques.

The energy which emerges from these escapes of fabrics, of which Clémence succeeds as by magic to fix the initial trace, obliges us to see how the artist makes the light circulate on the sculptures, and to discover how these colors can at any time change tone according to the light. The technical complexity of these works and the self-derision that the artist develops with humility and intelligence, for each of her series, make her one of the major artists of contemporary ceramics

A catalogue is published at the occasion of the exhibition

74 colour pages – text by Harry Bellet

HEILBRONN – POLARIS

Galleries — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 09:19:56 +0000

The fourth solo exhibition of Louis Heilbronn (lives and works in Los Angeles) at Galerie Polaris, Prologue to a Myth, is a series of 24 photographs, mixing the mediums of photography and drawing, made between September 2019 and July 2021.

Prologue to a Myth should be seen as a story, composed of several parts. This new series seeks to discuss the visual language of storytelling, and the embedded presence of narrative in photography. Each photograph can be seen as the representation of a symbol (imaginary or real) that evokes to the viewer, a sense of beginning, the start of a story, tale or myth. Louis Heilbronn ask us to search within our own memories for iconography that outlines this story.

Louis Heilbronn’s raw material has been, and remains, that of the intimate, which he accentuates in this new series by introducing a set of photographed drawings.
The ambiguity between drawing and photographed drawing, between imagined reality and photographed reality, is built around a series that seems to be born of a dream world.

The artist acts as a director, we are indeed on a theater stage, that of life, but seen as in a dream. By ignoring space, time and action, Louis Heilbronn brings to this series a magical observation of the invisible.

It is always with the same modesty and restraint that mark his three previous bodies of work: Meet me on the Surface (2013) From Flowers and More (2014) Orchard Continued (2019) that Louis Heilbronn continues to build a just and intelligent work in an atmosphere as beautiful as it is strange.

Everything here seems to be bathed in the “blue hour”, the moment before nightfall when the sky fills with a dark blue and transports us to another world.

Louis Heilbronn questions the creation of myths, tales, memories, and childhood, illuminating each scene, each object, each character, by reflecting on the ephemeral and the passage of time.
If a single photograph (Establishing shot,2020) ) takes us outside this sea of clouds, it seems to offer the infinity of a space that carries us towards all possibilities.

SIMON FAITHFULL – POLARIS

Galleries — Thu, 30 Jul 2020 12:22:27 +0000

Latest film Reconstitution for a Future Scenario 2: Cap Romano (HD Video, 8min)

Stranded on the half-submerged ruins of a futuristic ‘Dome Home’, a figure is haunted by memories of a home before its foundations were washed away by a series of hurricanes. The film was shot in ruins that lie off the coast of Florida – a luxury summer-house built by an oil engineer in 1979, but destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Further hurricanes eroded the coastline and further destabilized the house’s foundation until by 2013 the sand-island itself had built be swept away. The remaining domes are still visible above the water but are now stranded in the ocean. What was land is now sea. The film seems like a strange dream or a memory from the future.

Born in 1965 in England, Simon Faithfull studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and then at the University of Reading. Influenced by his travels and by Land Art, Simon Faithfull has developed a multidisciplinary practice mixing performance, video, photography, digital drawing, installation and writing.
His works are considered to be the traces of his performances or physical experiences (often challenging) of the early travellers and adventurers. Using the globe as a material to sculpt his films, and to question the limits of earth and sky space, but also to question the place of man, and of course the place of the artist.
Thus, based on proto-scientific experiments (the artist is often advised in his projects by the scientists themselves), whose importance and interest are far from the constraints of innovation and results, Simon Faithfull gives our world and his works a poetic and philosophical dimension of science. He also allows us to question ourselves about our near future, highlighting, like a Buster Keaton of art, our flaws and mistakes.

HEILBRONN – POLARIS

Galleries — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 11:51:00 +0000

Louis Heilbronn will present his third solo exhibition at the Polaris Gallery in Paris from March 9 to April 6, 2019.
Orchard Continued can be seen as an album of images collected over the course of solitary journey into the Californian landscape. Resembling a cultural inventory of the famed American west, it does not provide us with the means to identify specific locations, but instead immerses us, through an elliptical and critical narrative, in an anachronistic and undefined space and time.
A singular beauty emerges from in this series, most often coming from the strange contrast between the simplicity of the each landscape, subject or object photographed and the subtle light that emerges from their environment.As an observer of his own social space, Louis Heilbronn captures the “crossings” of this environment, from which he most often shows us extracts, pieces of life, focusing in detail on insignificant occurrences. Here, the pictorial, literary and cinematographic references that have shaped the imagination of the great American West are collected and combined with great deal of control.
With the intent of creating an idealized image, Louis Heilbronn photographs like a novelist, and with this series evokes thoughts that can be read among the ones of the American transcendentalists of the late 19th century. In this regard the spectator is offered the natural beauty of the world enveloped in the inherent quietness of each moment and landscape.
Leading us to feel as if we are seeing and feeling the world for the first time. The strength of Louis Heilbronn’s eye is to make us question what he shows us: these are not just vernacular landscapes but social and political landscapes, which question both our relationship to photography as a representation of the world but also the stability of nation and its uncertain future.
It is this gift and this interest in observation that makes it possible to say that photography is Louis Heilbronn’s natural language. With Orchard Continued the artist shares with us the need to continue to observe the world through this language. If it is the artist who decides which scenes we are to interpret, it is then the repertoire of images held by each viewer that will guide them in exploring the work, granting them access to the simplicity of its gaze.

Galerie Polaris – Paris 3

Galleries — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 06:08:39 +0000

Created by Bernard Utudjian, Polaris Gallery is one of the first contemporary art gallery of this area of Le Marais, in Paris. The new space rue des Arquebusiers, ( incredible array of contemporary talent between this street and rue Saint-Claude) was inaugurated in 2009, (The development was confided to Odile Decq, architect of recent Museum of Contemporary Art in Roma ( Macro) . Polaris made the very first solo exhibitions of the main artists represented, and is always open to emerging and newest tendencies in art. The gallery represents : Etienne Armandon, Eric Aupol, Bart Baele, Yto Barrada, Monika Brandmeier, Matthias Bruggmann, Antonio Caballero, Marcos Carrasquer, John Casey, Odile Decq, Simon Faithfull, Vanessa Fanuele, Harald Fernagu, Patrick Guns, Anthony Hernandez, Louis Heilbronn, Khaled Jarrar, Richard Mudariki, Sara Ouhaddou, Nigel Rolfe, Gaétan Vaguelsy, Walter Van Beirendonck, Clémence Van Lunen, Simon Willems.

TIXIER – POLARIS

Galleries — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 10:18:38 +0000

At first sight, Map with a view is a series of black abstract watercolours. Then one realizes that it is a collection of plans of prisons from all over the world.

This inventory of confinement geometries, of « social orthopaedics » spaces as Michel Foucault would call them, is made of around thirty prisons from different geographical and historical origins. Some of them no longer exist (the children’s prison la Petite Roquette in Paris which is now a park; Millbank prison in London has become the Tate Britain…); others have been reassigned (memorials and prison-museum such as Robben Island in South Africa or Indian Cellular Jail in India; museums like the Panoptico in Bogota which is currently the National Museum of Columbia; universities, like Saint-Paul et Saint-Jean in Lyon; luxury hotels…); other prisons are still operated.

Several years after using Piranese’s (Dolci Carceri) imaginary prisons in her works, Laure Tixier looks back on their architecture.

One day, while finding her way in the 14^th arrondissement of Paris, she discovered on Google Earth a blurred area corresponding to the prison de la Santé. She wanted to give shape to this black hole in the middle of the city. This attempt to repair the urban fabric is embodied via a transitional sculpture set on the floor of the gallery. The technique used for this « neighbourhood rug » is a mix of patchwork and palimpsest.

The historical thread is woven from the geographical research. The geometry of confinement has a long story : it was brought from Russia by Jeremy Bentham, germinated in London, flourished in America and brought into France by Alexis de Tocqueville. European countries established and multiplied prisons in their colonies – Asia and Africa - where they did not exist. Today, they are overpopulated.

On the wall, a carpet represents a neighbourhood of Ho Chi Minh Ville, with, in the centre, the prison Chi Boa built by the French during the colonial era and still in use today.

A bed sheet, symbol of intimacy, occasionally a jailbreak tool, is embroidered with the title of the exhibition and the plan of the State prison Pelican Bay in California. This jail is a Supermax installation in which the prisoner is totally isolated, including from the rest of the prison.

MORIN – DARD

Galleries — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 09:05:11 +0000

Poison and Opium
Justin Morin’s work lies at the borders of two different worlds. On the one hand is the world of art into which he frequently dips for inspiration, in particular looking back at the art of the Sixties. The form of expression used in his polished steel bars,silky colour gradients and kinetic sculptures is reminiscent of New York minimalism, the Californian Light and Space movement and Op art. On the other hand lies the world of fashion, fashion as an industry, which far from being limited to the universe of the catwalk, also deals with the design and production of clothing, accessories and cosmetics, as well as creating an imagery around its products, in other words marketing them. The exhibition highlights this awareness of the world of fashion on many different levels, the most obvious being the pair of shoes that their ownerseems to have left behind on the floor of the gallery. They evoke the current fashion for jewelled shoes: shoes that are increasingly beautiful, sculptural, strange and luxurious and less and less wearable it has to be said (here the soles are made out of concrete).
What is particularly interesting in this double positioning is less the fact of being part of a niche that has been exploited to the full for the last 15 years (the artist caught between art and fashion) than what this position allows Justin Morin to say about each of the two worlds. The worlds of art and fashion, that when all’s said and doneare not so close as some might think, could be described as two industries producing objects of beauty and Justin Morin reveals some of the principles that underlie their workings.
The term industry implies a means of production as well as the implementation of marketing strategies, such as the rapid renewal of the offer (fast fashion), the creation of more and more specialised niches to identify products and trends created from nothing. As well as being a repertoire of forms that may be borrowed to good effect, kinetic art also allows Justin Morin to highlight those sudden and all-powerful fads that sweep through both the worlds of art and fashion. At the start of kinetic art, there was a widespread craze for this new art form. The term Bridget mania was coined (after Bridget Riley and in reference to Beatlemania) and kinetic art was almost immediately overexploited, used in many and varied forms (textiles, TV set decors, film credits and motifs of every imaginable sort) to such a extent that Riley herself went to court to stop the commercial exploitation of her work. It then came to be considered dated and was sent to the art history purgatory during three whole decades, simply because it was so widely present throughout the Sixties and the Seventies. Vasarely for example still makes people cringe. At the moment, it is the object of a new wave of enthusiasm amongst specialists, collectors and the general public, the extent of which could be gauged at the recent Parisian exhibitions on Julio Le Parc and Perceptual art.
Justin Morin also takes an interest in how advertising creates value, a process that is fundamentally based on the production of photographic images (and more recently of short films). The source images for the silky colour gradients in his series How to drape are mainly drawn from the iconography of advertising on which television, cinema, the press and Internet all thrive and in which luxury, celebrity and fashion come together in a cocktail with the same imperative: seduction. What Justin Morin finds most interesting however is that most special moment when the imperative metamorphoses objects and bodies into images, a photographic alchemy which lies at the heart of the mechanics of advertising. The poison in the exhibition’s title could be understood as a criticism of the workings of this society of the spectacle, or at least as evoking the artist’s doubts as he observes a system that has become almost toxic as it tries to outdo itself turning images into a poison.
In our opinion however, it is more a reference to Christian Dior’s perfume Poison that was so popular in the 80s. It is also an indication of the artist’s continued quest to understand the nature of beauty, a questioning that is made clear in his series How to drape, but which underlies his entire body of work. How can one manage to create a beautiful drape, a beautiful bouquet, a beautiful sculpture, a beautiful exhibition? He already suggested one possible answer with La Ligne d’Hogarth (Hogarth’s line) that referred, by means of a bouquet, to one of the principles of composition as defended by the English artist in The Analysis of Beauty.
With Poison, Justin Morin is seeking the principles of beauty elsewhere, in the sensuality of oriental fragrances to be exact. The exhibition could just as easily have been called Opium because it immerses us in a concept of beauty dear to Baudelaire, torn between modernity and classicism, composed of benzoin, incense and venomous flowers, but also shop windows, goods, large cities and cosmetics. Baudelaire’s vision of beauty is laid out for all to see, but it is not clear whether the artist really adheres to the concept. In spite of these lingering doubts about the possibility of a form of beauty that could speak to everybody, and even of the very existence of a valid answer to the questions which float over this entire body of work like so many silken veils, one desire remains: that a work of art, whatever it may be, no longer offers itself to the spectator as an image does, but like a perfume. That it does not try to seduce the spectator at first sight, but remains constantly present in the mind’s eye now and ever after, like the memory of a heady musky scent that persists long after its wearer has gone.

Jill Gasparina

Justin Morin and Galerie Jeanroch Dard would like to thank : Charlotte Morel, Joachim de Callatay, Puntoseta and especially Paola di Valentino, Villa Noailles and especially Jean-Pierre Blanc and Magalie Guerin.

DECQ – POLARIS

Galleries — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 16:15:57 +0000

After Homéostasie in 2007 and Beyond horizon in 2011, Force en présence is Odile Decq’s third exhibition at the galerie Polaris.

While the single large sculpture Homéostasie, based on dynamic equilibrium, filled the gallery’s space, and while the installation of black mirrors Beyond horizon took the visitor beyond the limits of inside/outside space, Force en présence changes scale and focuses on the body and its relationship with space.

Odile Decq’s new exhibition, conceived with a minimalist approach, consists in works on wall, floor and ceiling. Their concern is the spatial representation of the body.

With Test Tube, placed on the floor, the artist wants to show how far she can get regarding the representation of her body. As a parallel between before and after, the colour red symbolizes the vivid body, while black represents the inert body.

Contrary/conversely to the body’s materiality and gravity, Head Bowl invites the visitor to concentrate on one’s « self »: isolated into the work in the middle of his environment, he observes the world that can’t see him.

Between these two antagonisms, body and spirit, it becomes necessary to find a meeting point. It is on the wall that Odile Decq presents Dynamic Equilibrium, a perspective of the inner ear’s receivers, which are the location of equilibrium.

At last, Mental Horizon is a video about immaterial escape.

Parallel to these works is a set of 11 silkscreen printings, the subject of which is the FRAC Bretagne. These prints are the result of a collaboration with the publisher Bernard Chauveau. The series consists in 12 sheets of graphic interpretation that recall the founding elements of the project: circulation, cross-section, auditorium, as well as the facade and the shades of black matter, which she investigates.

A perfect control of the minimalist disposition of the works in the gallery’s space emphasizes the mysterious presence of the works.

Is it the architect’s mastery that dictated the layout of the works or is it the works that regulate the immateriality so dear to Odile Decq.

As the artist says: « I remain the guardian of the initial idea », it will be the visitor who will decide of its meaning and functioning.

LAUMANN-DARD

Galleries — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:52:40 +0000

ANDREW LAUMANN
Desperate Living

Desperate Living is a collection of works influenced by aesthetics found in «no where zones» of Baltimore, wooded areas tucked in between the population where forgotten people reside. The name pulled from John Waters’ 1977 film of the same title, Laumann likens the plot line of the disenfranchised outcasts creating their own utopia of trash to destruction as a form of creation. The aesthetic parallel between synthetic and orga- nic, natural erosion and urban struggle, re-contextualizing «street art».
These paintings mimic sculptures, the materials used stray from traditional art making materials, instead using found objects. Deconstructing and then reconstructing them, distorting the functional, creating a visual dyslexia.
The Oblivion series discarded flyers from weekly club events are weathered and then scraped and layered as a fine dust, likened to space dust. Untitled (Dog Walker), public communications layered until no message is left but the remnants of the action and suppression. Old Fucking Navy, Seel and Sunshine, repossessed containers melted down distorting the rigid, forcing it from function to abstract. These monochromatic forms yet synthetic mimic natural deconstructed forms like a tree with cancer or rocks molded together from ero- sion.
Andrew Laumann was born (1987) in Baltimore, MD (USA) where he lives and works. He is self taught, instead of enrolling in college he spent his formative years as a drifter around the country. He moved back to Balti- more (2009) and immediately founded the Pent House Gallery. Desperate Living is his first solo exhibition in France.