Accrochage collectif d’artistes — Hors-champ. De la pensée à l’œuvre — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 11 → May 17, 2014

Galerie Jean Fournier presents the exhibition Outside the Box: from the thought to the work, a selection that uses the concept of experience as a pretext for showing more intimate, hitherto unseen aspects of the work of these artists. This is the second part of the exhibition cycle begun in the autumn of 2013 with Almost Black and White, which brought together several generations of artists spanning the period from the gallery’s founding in the 1950s up to the present.

“In a workshop, a studio, a laboratory, etc., the failures are as valuable as the greatest successes: they testify to the consistency of the path being followed. And as time passes it often happens that a work moves from one category to the other.”

Camille Saint-Jacques, Le don paisible in L’art comme expérience, Collection Beautées, 2010, Liénart éditions.

The participating artists have provided previously unshown works, together with sketchbooks, studies and other material potentially sustaining for the creative process, although sometimes having no direct link with what they usually exhibit. How does thought function here ?

A partial reply may be perceptible in the work of Gilgian Gelzer, whose paintings, drawings and photographs seem to convey visually his thought processes, hesitations and exaggerations. Thought can change direction, too, as in Pierre Buraglio’s sketchbooks from Umbria and Greece and their return to the sources of classical, naturalistic drawing. Indirectly, thinking can morph into reverie and mental excursion: Stéphane Bordarier’s erotic and figurative drawings signal these additional finds ’outside the box’ of painting.

Sketchbooks and drawings are also home to studies intended, as in the cases of Claude Tétot and Nicolas Guiet, as a step towards a finished work. Peter Soriano, however, challenges this idea with his investigations of the autonomy of drawing. Given the near-’volatile’ nature of his wall paintings, the sketchbooks and studies are the traces of his thinking and of the evolution of the work. This transition from notebook to wall, and from study to larger work, is a fundamental aspect of the work of Frédérique Lucien. With its varying relationships between different scales and colours, his recent Feuiller series speculates about the non finito.

The studio can also be a place for all kinds of experiments with materials. Buraglio makes this the subject of his work, drawing on an inexhaustible repertoire of materials that even includes his own palettes. Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel has opted for her first showing of ceramics, the outcome of her exploration of clay’s density and malleability. Shown here for the first time and with the close collaboration of his family, the works by Lille artist Bernard Guerbadot, who died in 2005, are in a somewhat similar vein. Emphasising porousness between media, these plaster pieces are at once drawings and sculptures. As both mental and working space, the studio becomes the actual subject of an oeuvre. In her debut at the gallery Chloé Dugit-Gros is presenting videos whose elements come together for just a moment — the duration of their unstable equilibrium — and give rise to painterly and sculptural situations in progress. The transparency effects in a large preliminary drawing on tracing paper reveal the erasures and grids that are part of the preparations for a monumental work.

Pierre Mabille is showing a group of studies — explorations of tones and values — together with a huge strip of paper printed by the Franck Bordas workshop. With nearscientific precision the artist experiments with colour in all its tiniest variations. Colour is also Jean François Maurige’s concern: in addition to his pictures he paints every day on predominantly red appointment books, the typography showing through and interacting with the colour in the same kind of way as when he paints on both sides of the paper.

Experience and chance are concepts that can go hand in hand, as in the work of Claude Viallat, for whom the picture support determines the choice of colours. Shown here for the first time, this series of works on paper reflects the overtly experimental side of his work since the 1970s, in terms of both creative process and the use of the most unassuming materials.

Among the exhibition’s high points, a newly unfolded Tabula by Simon Hantaï could serve as a metaphor for the show as a whole. The artist’s thinking is nestled in the folds, on the threshold of his starring effects and the revelation of colour. Thus this unfolded Tabula reveals the transition to the act of painting.

Exhibition curator: Emilie Ovaere-Corthay, director of the gallery.