Atmosphères sensibilisées* takes the relationship to space in Jean-Luc Vilmouth’s work as its starting point.

This space may be mental and encourage projections and dreams, or physical and conform to units of measurement. It could be social and facilitate encounters. The space is the expanse that does not obstruct movement. In philosophy, space refers to the ideal environment that holds all of our perceptions; indefinite, it contains all existing or conceivable objects.

The spatial dimension composes the work of Jean-Luc Vilmouth, who used to refer to himself as an “augmenter” rather than a sculptor. Combined with questions of disconcerting simplicity – how do we imagine other types of relationships? How do we continue to inhabit the world? – his works soberly highlight what already exists and what we don’t wish to see. Just like a breath, a space opens up. They thwart the cognitive biases of apprehending reality to consider more direct relationships, to narrow the distance that separates humans from their environment.

Jean-Luc Vilmouth has taught at the art schools of Grenoble – together with Ange Leccia – and Paris, and has led several generations of artists to question the exhibition format and the very idea of sculpture. About the workshop, he explained: “I try to give it a certain climate. Atmosphères sensibilisées perhaps sensitive to something other than just making artworks.” In France and internationally, his work has largely contributed to the shift from an aesthetic interest in the object, in the 1980s, to that of the installation and the environment, in the 1990s and 2000s.

To extend the monograph devoted to him at the MO.CO Hôtel des Collections in Montpellier last spring, the exhibition Atmosphères sensibilisées brings together the work of eight artists who have evolved through their contact with him: Ange Leccia, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Seulgi Lee, Véronique Joumard, Florian Mermin,

Mao Tao, Gaël Lévêque, and Leïla White-Vilmouth. It is about dream- and trance-like spaces, activable or suspended, dry climates or wetlands.

Atmosphères sensibilisées suggests the most intense and yet the simplest aspects of Jean-Luc Vilmouth’s teachings: “to be relational; to be experiential”.

Home… So many other words spring from this one. At once abode, refuge, shelter, a home exists in our own home, and elsewhere: in a café, a town or city, or a bookshop. But what is this place, really? By dint of making a home from what is not one, what actually hallmarks it vanishes. This is what is proposed by the show’s title, inspired by the famous line of Gertrude Stein taken from her poem Sacred Emily*, written in 1913. Over and above the material nature of the home, this exhibition is concerned with its most rudimentary interior, from the furniture scattered across the floor to the moments of life which unfold in it. The furniture on view suggests in its arrangement the main components of a home, while paintings and videos illustrate the moments of sharing, tenderness and solitude which it permits.
* Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Jonathan Bernad
 Isabelle Le Normand (b. 1980, lives and works in Paris) is Director of Visual Arts at Mains d’OEuvres, a multidisciplinary space in Saint-Ouen where she has curated over 30 exhibitions.
She has also curated independently in Paris, Los Angeles, Bourges, Budapest, and Marseille.
In 2013 she created an artist exchange program between Paris and Los Angeles in partnership with Machine Project and Mains d’OEuvres.
Isabelle Le Normand recently founded Courtesy, a commercial gallery and a curatorial agency based in Los Angeles.

This absurd retirement is neither arrogant nor eloquent; simply, it is beyond understanding. Besides a hesitant look at painting, to my mind, this absence is the result of a series of misunderstandings, which this new exhibition may be the opportunity to reduce, if not clear up, thus allowing his artistic project to be considered in its very topicality, and in a complexity which is never specious.

For some years, Dominique Figarella has sometimes stuck on his paintings digigraphy prints of scenes, which seem to have been taken in the studio, inhabited by a human presence, never strictly appearing as the artist himself. These scenes always look Eden-like: sunlights, paintings carried like surfboards, crossed legs you guess with feet up…

Dominique Figarella obviously gives the looker-on the image of a “practice” which has nothing to do with “work”, but also that of an “object” which still remains an “adventure”. The anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century, Mallarmé and Fénéon circle, Incoherent Arts, Dada, Fluxus, situationists, are the members of the genealogy he indisputably proclaims, dominated by Kurt Schwitters and George Brecht. Dominique Figarella means to take his revenge on bourgeois, even aristocratic painting, to substitute it for craftsman painting.

To Dostoyevsky’s ambiguous motto, “beauty will save the world”, apparently, Albert Einstein echoed, “ craftsmanship might well save the world”. Between the two of them, Dominique Figarella has found room for a studio.
Stéphane Corréard

JULIA ROMETTI & VICTOR COSTALES

PLANTES | LITTERATURE | NEOTROPICAL | AGAVE | CHAMAN | GEOMETRIE | EXOTISMO INTERNACIONAL | MONSTERA DELICIOSA | STONES | AZUL JACINTO MARINO | COSMOVISIÓN | CACTUS | GEOGRAPHIE  | ANARQUISMO MAGICO | PALMA | PERSPECTIVISME | ARTAUD | VISION | ERRANTE | SYMETRIE | HORIZONTAL | ROJO Y NEGRO | CONTROLLED EQUIVOCATION | ROCHES VOLCANIQUES | MULTISTABLE | STRATEGIES SUCCULENTES | CONTINGENCE | TUMBLING BLOCKS | SAUVAGE

This  homage to suburbs that take in everything cities reject reminds us that artists themselves are kept at a distance from the city center, although they are needed to supply the art fairs and plethora of exhibitions that are organized there all year round. This is nothing new: Erik Satie was struggling to survive in Arcueil while the bourgeois of Paris were entertained by his ballet Parade in 1917. Today, there are countless creators of all disciplines who live and work in suburbia, a sort of artist’s back entrance to the center. Life takes care of reminding them that they are only suppliers. La bohème was short-lived. We are a thousand miles from that insouciance. This explains the grating aspect of Heidi Wood’s pictogram images whose clinical craftsmanship cuts like a blade.
We can describe Heidi Wood as an urban pictographer landscape painter. She draws using black masking tape so as to distance herself from gesture, to dehumanize as far as possible. This is the ultimate in anti-impressionism, stripped of all emotion.
She  distinguished herself previously with a series of souvenir plates printed with industrial landscapes, in a style more suited to a picturesque seaside resort.
Note  that everything is programmed in Heidi Wood’s artistic production. There is no room for indecision. Everything is in its place in a sort of constructivism revisited.
PhD [DEC MMXII]

Michelangelo Penso is one of the most influential artist on the Italian contemporary art scene. Specialized in sculpture, installation and drawing, he has always been interested in various materials. His latest works, developing a new concept of sculpture, are composed by materials of industrial origin, such as rubber and polyester belts or pieces of aluminum and steel: genetic structures expanded to fill a real space.

Working in a space between art and science, Penso’s pieces are conceived to be understood both in the macro aesthetic and in the micro aesthetic domain. His sculptures and installation are clearly and objectively perceived, but they also recall the other senses, indeed, creating different connections and images in our brain. All his consideration is about memory: the memory of a past life in a distant place (as for the drawn moleskins series) or the memory of a genetic and biological form (as for his latest works), to be continuously changed and modify.

For this exhibition, Michelangelo Penso chose to pay tribute to the French writer Gaston de Pawlowski, who inspired Marcel Duchamp in his artwork « The Large Glass », referring to Chapter XXXIII of his novel Journey to the land of the Fourth dimension (1912), in which he speaks about giant bacterium.

As the metaphor of the human condition and its fragility, a giant sculpture  (Physarum polycephalum, 2013) completely invade, in a disturbing way, the gallery space from the first to the second floor, opened and inaugurated on this occasion.