Nouveau Réalisme = nouvelles approches perceptives du réel — Galerie GP & N Vallois
The GP & N Vallois gallery presents a large-scale exhibition dedicated to New Realism which once again resonates with the sparkles of these avant-garde hunters who have been able to distill within their present an aesthetic recomposition of the real which still abruptly upsets ours.
Nouveau Réalisme = nouvelles approches perceptives du Réel @ Galerie G-P & N Vallois from June 12 to July 24, 2021. Learn more Emblematic work of this presentation which confirms the gallery’s deeper and deeper anchoring in the history of art, the accumulation of gas masks by Arman shows how much these artists were able to seize emblematic elements of their reality in order to erect compositions emancipated from the fantasy of a “universal”, floating in the sky of ideas. The gas mask is very concrete; artefact of protection, health’s accessory and ironically inseparable from theaters of wars or social conflicts, it carries a bivalence which, by reducing the singularity of each person’s face, takes on board any being who would wear it in a common destiny as chimeras struggling for their survival in a hostile environment. Meaningful and yet “consumable” product, the gas mask refers to the paradigm of the industrial modernity as well as it evokes the funeral altars of the catacombs where the piles of skulls erect up the morbid monuments of our programmed deaths.
A major piece which, with the newspapers of a day frozen in time (Arman, Déchets bourgeois, 1959), with the posters of an icon torn from its present (Mimmo Rotella, Marilyn, 1963), the remains of a meal (Daniel Spoerri, Tableau Piège, 1963), the remains of a darts game (Niki de Saint Phalle, Tir avec tête de poupée, 1962), the relics of reassembled mechanical parts (Jean Tinguely , Radio WNYR 10, 1962), an immortalized combustion (Yves Klein, Peinture de feu sans titre, 1961) and the compression of forms (César) or the walls of a store transposed into a work (Christo, Store Front, 1964), engage the symbols of a new society that all these artists want us to feel “again”. The “common” merges into the object, into its possession and vice versa: the “singularity”, as mentioned by the movement itself, is “collective”. The interior walls of museums, like the intimate ones of collectors, must therefore represent “something” that feels like the world alongside them. The border between the outside and the inside, between the hidden and the revealed is ravaged; in this reversal, it is the act of recognition of movement itself (a deeply intimate “awareness” by nature) that is maximized and implemented in a Declaration constitutive du Nouveau Réalisme, 1960 chalked out on Klein blue paper which mentions this formula “New Realism = new perceptual approaches to reality”.
With all these pieces as historically strong as they are meaningful, the exhibition New Realism = New Perspective Approaches to Reality supports the conceptual tenor of a movement that reinvents the plasticity of the fine arts. The materials follow one another, face each other in a serious and simple scenography revealing how these artists could transform into patterns the variations of their present. The reality became an actress and the horizon reverses perspective to become the setting of a theater where its avatars, the works of art, are exhibited.
Thus the presentation itself goes beyond its “historical” framework; the reality is that which affects every member of societies whose landscapes are reshaped by technical evolution. Consequently, the creation and the invention of a perspective on our world go through the confrontation with these arrangements of the real whose only presence translates centuries of invention, years of symbols and evolution and more than anything becomes a dizzying matrix of singular stories entangled in the common destiny of societies.
And, when we know to what extent the gallery inserts this heritage in a dialogue with the artists who have succeeded them, we understand to what extent this selection makes it possible to highlight even more the tension of an art devoted to immanence, bringing plastic invention back into the realm of reality, on the horizontal plane of affects and sharing.
New Realism = new perspective approaches to reality_ especially recalls, ultimately, this evidence of a movement which, if it is crippled by paradoxes, will have been able to make a fragment of time fundamentally coincide in a “there”, giving to read the “present” in all its “polysemic trinity”, a being given to contemplation, torn from a past and a future to freeze its now and put in a place that gives it its value.
_The present (offering) is present (there) in the present (now). Being, time and space, another equation that this exhibition happily extends; a three-headed tautology that multiplies all the better the life force of this New Realism which will remain alive for a long time.
