jeudi 12 juin 2008

Jimmy Robert (CAC Brétigny)

Sans titre, 2005. Mixed media. 20 x 45 x 60 cm



Sans titre, 2008. 1,58 x 1,12 m. Jet d’encre sur papier Arche. Papier scotch A3

Légèrement Manipulés
Jimmy Robert travaille indifféremment la photographie, la performance ou le film, essayant de créer une conversation entre les pièces individuelles mais aussi les utilisant comme des entités indépendantes. Ses installations composées de photos, de collages et d'éléments sculpturaux évoquent l'instabilité de la représentation via la porosité des images, les dynamiques des surfaces créant des images pluridimensionnelles. Dans ses films, l'artiste explore l'idée de juxtaposition et de performativité des matériaux à travers l'utilisation de proches et leur aliénation dans un espace donné. Avec ses performances, l'artiste explore plus directement l'idée du corps comme matériau, ajoutant intentionnellement des couches pour mettre en avant la complexité de la lecture des images. L'intertextualité ou le potentiel des références joue un rôle important dans son travail, la narrativité du contenu et la narrativité de la forme sont ainsi toujours en dialogue que ce soit dans une oeuvre indépendante ou lorsque des oeuvres sont juxtaposées. L'artiste explique ainsi sa démarche: « Mon travail gravite autour de l'espace entre la matérialité et la représentation allant de la photographie au film et à la performance. Il questionne mon insatisfaction à l’égard de l'image objet. J'essaye de regarder l'image comme un objet et par conséquent d’envisager sa relation au corps. A partir de là, ma recherche s'oeuvre sur l'idée de désir et d'image, mais aussi sur la dynamique des surfaces. J'essaye d'activer la porosité de différents supports identifiés comme la littérature et le cinéma, pour aller au-delà de la page ou de l'écran en intégrant l'image ou en incarnant le texte; c'est de toute manière dans la lignée des ‘Correspondances’ Baudelairienne ou d’une synesthésie. En sublimant le désir, j'établis une relation entre tactilité et visualité. Ces dernières années, je me suis très précisément intéressé à Marguerite Duras et sa relation à l'écriture, aux films ainsi qu’à son traitement de la répétition et de la condensation de l'histoire d'amour absolu qu'elle enlève pratiquement du texte et donne comme un souvenir universel à récrire au lecteur/spectateur, amenant l'histoire vers de nouveaux lieux de récit. Sa façon de traduire l’expérience de la vie en une représentation tout autant que la manière dont elle soutient, restitue le désir et la mémoire dans ses thèmes et parallèlement dans la forme, sont constitutifs de ma pratique. Etant moi-même des Antilles françaises, ayant été amené en France, ayant vécu à Londres et en Hollande et maintenant installé à Bruxelles, la notion d'espace, en rapport à l'absence et à l'aliénation, est une problématique qui questionne constamment mon travail, où les doutes et la fragmentation sont moteurs. J'examine la relation entre l'image et le corps sous la forme d’une recherche autour du corps et sa redondance à l'égard de différents médias, en produisant des performances, performances pour la vidéo ou pour des films ; j'explore l'échec des processus d'identification, leur limite, mais aussi, par la productivité, la possibilité de leur constante réinscription dans une signification nouvelle et différente. »

Joanna Fiduccia:
Jimmy Robert’s artworks are liable to attract a whole range of catchall terms for contemporary art: They are performative, yet object-based; cinematic, yet haptic. In this exhibition, ink-jet prints, film and video, MDF boards, and A4-size sheets of white paper manage to make all these descriptors strangely happy consorts. Boards and blank sheets divide and chart the space, functioning not only as makeshift walls and supports but also as compositional elements in their own right. But rather than obscure or modify the standardized format of these elements, Robert embraces their standardization in all its banal glory. In one work, an ink-jet print of a forlorn bedside table is thumbtacked to the wall, partially obscured by a quintet of blank A4s. Other sheets slump together at the floorboard, one printed with a waggish narrative fragment that, as if in the windfall of all this paper, has lost the rest of its tale. By creasing and furling these sheets and distributing their silhouettes throughout the show, Robert uses the blank page, and the ink-jet technology associated with it, to both exploit subtle textures and thwart narrative completion. Such gestures of concealment are like an elegant striptease: in collages tucked behind MDF panels, in a photo portrait partly covered with a twisted page that references the chiffon bodice of Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (a postcard of the nineteenth-century painting rests beside it), or in an undulating torso viewed through a doorway in the film Saynètes, 2004. But in his most stirring works, elusion can also occur in the illusion of full disclosure. Robert’s collages, scanned and reproduced on large posters, seem to crackle with graphic precision, every arabesque of tape precisely affixed behind the inviolable surface of digital technology—masquerading, almost successfully, as textured surfaces. But this nearly pornographic precision is less the byproduct of any technological fixation than an effort to eke delicacy out of standardized, indelicate modes of reproduction. Tacked up with an entomologist’s self-conscious care, these reproductions put forth rare pleasures.

mercredi 4 juin 2008

Stuart Bailey & David Reinfurt

Entrée du workshop "juste à temps" et de la librairie occasionnelle Dexter Sinister au 38 Ludlow Street dans le quartier Lower East Side de New York

lundi 2 juin 2008

Blake Rayne (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York)


Untitled, 2008, 16mm anamorphic film by Megan Fraser, Tour d’Ombres, 2007, Bell Howell projector, looper, laserjet print on 8 ½ x 11 inch paper

Blake Rayne’s exhibition revolves around a number of paintings, each of which results from a standard operation of construction. Rayne unfolds, primes, folds and directs an aerosol spray of pigment onto a roll of linen from which sections are then chosen, sewn and cropped into a consistent scale. Rayne’s paintings, which situate themselves between a history of reflexive material procedures and structures of linguistic description, produce the canvas as a site of conflict between an impossible autonomy and a dispersed referentiality. If Rayne doubles the readymade weave of his canvas in a textile patterning, one whose folding and merging he chromatically designates, then these paintings are also textualized as scripts of production: displacing material process into the flat, graphic space of linguistic signs. (Indeed, one might be forgiven for perceiving the spatial structure of distorted majuscules as a result of the folding process through which the paintings are produced.)
Displayed alongside these canvases are the crates in which they were shipped. The latter, hung on the walls along side their supposed content, are cast as the gestural co-presence of painting’s movement from studio, to display, to storage. During the exhibition Rayne will extend the weft which binds his particular type of textile/textual processes, reaching from the material sign of “painting” to yet another container: the gallery will be closed for a set duration of the exhibition, to be re-opened for its final four weeks.
The logic of painterly abstraction which Rayne deploys, thus extended into a gesture of folding – of closing and re-opening – the gallery, weaves container and contained in an imbricated and inextricable relationship: one structuring the other according to the un-sutured fabric of cultural abstraction. Neighborhood gentrification, that which envelopes the gallery as a specific sort of place in a specific time, could be a potentially enfolded element, its cycles and un-even developments closing and opening to certain classes of people and certain types of investment. Far from neutrally designating these cycles, Rayne claims the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, as an emblematic textual element, inscribing a stance onto canvas positioned to one side of the line demarcated by his folds. Rayne describes the novel as illustrating “a moment at which a certain class reflexively discovers the hollowness of the conventions and means of self-representation upon which it is founded, just at the moment before the depression,” and this seems topical enough with Bear Sterns throwing-in the devalued chips that they had so recklessly invested in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. It is that other side, relative to but definitely not paradise, which appears in Rayne’s work as the breakdown of historical projects of painterly abstraction. But this reiteration of breakdown comes latent with new conditions for work to be done, ones which Rayne suggests urgently need to be unfolded.


Jerry Saltz:
Blake Rayne’s looming new show is very full and very good. The large-scale paintings look like Pattern & Decoration crossed with fabric design, geometric abstraction, and Russian folk art. Near the paintings—which are hung cheek-by-jowl, salon style—are dark-brown wooden rectangles. At first these come off as comments on the wood-paneled rooms of the gilded age and seem to echo the rampant gentrification of the Lower East Side. They turn out to be packing crates for the paintings. This turns the actual artworks into something like transient or displaced visitors—personalities that you connect to. This is Rayne’s clearest, most optically satisfying show in some time.

Anne Doran:
For theoretically inclined painter Blake Rayne, self-reflexivity is something of a contact sport. In this lucid and lively show, Rayne puts painting up against two heavyweight Conceptualist strategies: process art as practiced by such artists as Robert Ryman, and the institutional critique of Daniel Buren and his successors. The canvases—produced, like Rayne’s earlier work, according to predetermined steps—have undeniable visual punch. Here, using a technique borrowed from Simon Hantaï (an artist much admired by Buren), Rayne folds pieces of primed linen, spray paints the exposed surfaces and cuts the material into strips, which are sewn together. The results, executed in muted ochres, purples and blue-greens, are reminiscent of typography, tribal textiles and early Ellsworth Kelly. Each painting is customized, sometimes with just a drip of paint, other times with high-modernist quotations—an Art Deco numeral five in one work, for example, references both Charles Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold and e.e. cummings’s Is 5. Rayne situates these paintings in an economic, cultural and temporal context by staining and hanging the work’s shipping crates like paneling, moving the gallery office to the center of the space and including a film from the previous exhibition here. The show’s most intriguing element is a vintage photograph depicting a bicycle retrofitted as a stationary machine for sharpening knives. Its message seems unmistakable: In repurposing painting to Conceptual ends, Rayne suspends the modernist ideal of forward progress, even as he creates the conditions in which new possibilities might unfold.

Holland Cotter:
The abstract paintings in this show, an important one for this impressive New York artist, were made with aerosol spray directed at folded, cut and stitched-together canvas. And the pictures are only part of a larger conceptual package that includes the display of the paintings' shipping containers and has involved closing the gallery for a week. Mr. Rayne's taking apart of art conventions is erudite, visually effective and of a piece: the installation looks like a cross between a paneled library and a spreading bruise.