Stéphane Bérard — Brutal Warburg — Eva Meyer Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 11 → April 23, 2011

Augmentation de la superficie : a work in-situ, created by moving the gallery’s offices and storerooms to another space to free up a new space for this exhibition and the ones that follow, in a permanent manner. A bit of rubble collected and placed on the floor will symbolize this gesture.

Fini le temps des vases (a work in-situ) uses the “lost” space created by a drain pipe on the ceiling as a potential recipient for a bouquet of flowers.

Training : a wall papered with a floral motif seems to indicate a sudden change in régime, as though the gallery were absorbing the walls of arrondissements or neighborhoods slated to be gentrified in the near future.

A Return of a work, stored against a wall, still in its package.

Spam : outside, on the gallery’s façade, a flashing sign (a plug of tobacco) will undoubtedly attract passersby, new clients?

Ajout is the generic title for various artistic proposals that have no other function than to antagonize their own conceptual concerns. Presented here in the form of a little stale stuffed stork.

As Anne Faucheret writes about Stéphane Bérard : “Each work functions as an autonomous test governed by an internal economy. The linguistic strategists are protean and shifting, playing on the lability of the communication functions, on different relationships between denotation and connotation and on different degrees of fiction […] From the formal, thematic, referential, methodical parceling, the failure of another of the work’s principles results : that of the author ensuring the coherence of the whole. It is the end of the formulated and monolithic artistic intention.”¹

¹ p. 102, in French Connection, Blackjack éditions, 2008.