Pas un jour sans une œuvre — Programmation en ligne de la galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
Slash-Paris soutient et partage les initiatives de galeries désireuses de maintenir leur rôle de diffuseurs de la création artistique. En collaboration avec la galerie Loevenbruck, nous accueillons le projet Pas un jour sans une œuvre qui revient chaque jour sur le travail d’un de leurs artistes accompagné d’une note de présentation d’un acteur du monde de l’art.
Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Les Clowns, 2017 by Éric Mangion
Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux collects clown paintings, a fetish from popular culture. The fact is hardly surprising for this artist capable of switching from Schopenhauer to the Ronettes in a flick of the polyurethane. These little pictures are banded together for display, squeezed together like Old Master paintings betokening the academicism of the day. There are about sixty of them, more or less well made, gleaned here and there from car boot sails and, nowadays, on the web. It’s as pretty as a circus without the soleil. But what is even finer, and perhaps more touching, is that there is an isolated figure, out to the fore. The chief, the abductee, the stray? This solitary portrait comes from the collection of American actor Vincent Price, best known for his horror films. He sits facing an assembly of confreres and their “silent laughter and tears.” Here we think of He Who Gets Slapped (1924) by the Swedish director and its famous scene of a circus audience made up only of clowns, watching the “man with a thousand faces,” Lon Chaney, playing a cuckolded scientist who has become a clown, styling himself as “He who gets slapped” and whose nightly act consists of precisely that: getting slapped. The famous and iconic Joker also comes to mind, giving this old-fashioned collection a more contemporary feel.
Éric Mangion, April 2020
Werner Reiterer, The Rich and The Poor, 2019
Werner Reiterer’s works walk a fine line between sense and nonsense, exploiting art’s close proximity to life as a means of challenging literal descriptions of reality. In a manner that blurs the boundaries of art and humor, his richly engaging sculptures ask us to participate in their realisation while his drawings disturb our expectations of the ordinary in imaginings of absurd proportion. And by scrambling the relationship of images and language he is able to turn our perceptions upside down and, in ways that are both entertaining and illuminating, reassert the power of art to change our lives.
Julien Robson in Text(e)s, Paris: éditions Loevenbruck, 2009, p.182
The Rich and the Poor (2019) was exhibited on Loevenbruck booth during FIAC 2019
Jean Dupuy, Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust), 1968 by Éric Mangion
In 1967, after a good decade of services to gestural painting, Jean Dupuy left Paris and the School of Paris for New York. A very different atmosphere. There he was gifted 180 sheets of polyethylene measuring 200 × 90 × 0.6 cm by the Celanese Corporation. He kept them in his studio, where they doggedly gathered dust, even though he wiped them clean every evening. He therefore decided to work with the dust itself, not by stocking and “breeding” it, but by restoring its lightness and mobility. He conceived a box in which an extremely low-density red pigment (Lithol Rubin) was shaken by the heartbeats of the visitor, who as at once the actor and observe of the piece. This Cone Pyramid (Heart beats dust) won the 1968 Experiments in Art and Technology prize organised by Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg. This in turn led to a presentation of the work at the Brooklyn Museum and, simultaneously, of a second version at MoMA in The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, the now legendary show organised there by Pontus Hulten.
Éric Mangion, “Jean Dupuy, Quatre millions trois cent vingt mille secondes”, press release of the eponymous exhibition, galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, 2012.
This artwork is part of the exhibition project for Art Basel 2020.
Alina Szapocznikow, Lampe-bouche, 1966-1968 by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux
Elsewhere — excuse me if I quote myself — I wrote that these sculptures “take on a perverse, erotic and venomous beauty — a Fleurs du Mal side — in an aesthetic vein imbued with a very fin-de-siècle hallucinatory quality […] but revisited by a deceptively fresh Pop culture. For example, the illuminated mouths may tend towards a flourishing decorative beauty in stunningly beautiful barley-sugar colours, but they are no less infused with anxious, caustic humour, a bit like the carnivorous plant in Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors, which is fed with bits of human bodies (a hand, a foot). Szapocznikow exploits the ambiguity of intimacy, of desire and disgust, of formlessness and the elusiveness of life. The tart tones, gelatinous transparency or opacity of polystyrene, polyurethane or wax materialise a transorganic fluidity which, like the sleep of reason, brings forth seductive monsters in the form of agglutinated breasts, eternally smiling mouths, plump bellies1.” At the time I omitted — simply because I didn’t think to do so — to point out that these sculptures “lit up”: literally, and in the expected way (most are entitled Mouth or Buttock Lamps or Sculpture-Lamp) but also, more subtly, because they cast a sharp light on the obscurantism that still doggedly dominates our world.
Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, “Alina, please show us that sex we’d rather not see!”, from the press release of the exhibition “Alina Szapocznikow, Luminous Works”, Paris, galerie Loevenbruck, 2013. Lampe-bouche (1966-1968) is part of the Pinault Collection
1 Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, “Alina Forever” in Twist Tropiques, Paris: Editions Loevenbruck and Yellow Now/Côté Arts, 2012.
Morgane Tschiember, Swing, 2012 by Stéphanie Airaud
Morgane Tschiember, who comes from Brest, plays with material, colour, space and movement. Continuing and extending the modernist tradition, she “twists” the broad principles of minimal art. Swing is an immersive installation on an architectural scale, in which the wall’s softness and relation to the wall echoes the antiform sculptures of Robert Morris. The soft strips of PVC, hung on either side of the space, form an overturned vessel which the visitor is invited to enter. The work is specially conceived for the volume it occupies. It was premiered — as one might say for a choreographic piece — at the Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain in Sète in 2012, on the occasion of her solo show “Swing’nd Rolls & Bubbles”. The artwork Swing is part of the Collection MAC VAL, Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, acquired in 2017 with the support of FRAM Île-de-France.
Stéphanie Airaud, in Le vent se lève : parcours de la collection, Vitry-sur-Seine, MAC VAL musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, 2020, p. 178-179
Philippe Mayaux, Tableau de mariage — Inclinaison 33 degrés, deux cœurs en 69, 1993
“Two loving hearts, for poetry look no further than that.” Victor Hugo
Exhibition: « Cœurs. Du romantisme dans l’art contemporain », musée de la Vie romantique, Paris, 14 February — 12 July 2020
Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Ram, 2012
In 2012, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel created a series of singular artworks, eight animated GIFs that were shown for the first time at Spike Island, an international contemporary art centre in Bristol. These short, looped video sequences show figurative sculptures in clay which the artists created outdoors, and then animated, image by image, using stop motion technique. Ram, but also Le Menuet, Legs, Bump, Diver, Entrechat, Motorcycle, Ox and Pigs, draw on popular imagery, erotic iconography and regional folklore. Works from this series are part, in particular, of these collections: Lab’ Bel — Laboratoire artistique du groupe Bel, Les Abattoirs — Frac Midi Pyrenées, Toulouse, Frac Corse, Corte, Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou.
