B R E T H R E N

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B R E T H R E N

Exhibition

Sculpture

Past: May 21 → July 23, 2016

In connexion with the presentation by the gallery of the sculpture La Madeleine by Paul Wallach at the Palais de Tokyo for CHOICES Collectors Week-End, the gallery hosts a solo show of the artist featuring his latest sculptures.

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The American sculptor Paul Wallach always gives just as much particular attention to the titles of his exhibitions as he does the construction of his works. For this exhibition at the gallery, he chose the title B R E T H R E N. An ancient term drawn from the English language, it evokes the idea of a brotherly link, not however limited to the idea of familial ties.

Very often, the sculptures of the artist respond to each other, are in dialogue with each other and with us in the space that surrounds them. Changing according to variations in light, mood, or point of view, they are born from the assembly of very diverse materials. To wood, the main living material of each sculpture, is often added plaster, metal, canvas, or paint. The impression of unity that emanates from Wallach’s sculptures comes from the cohesion of the assembly of the whole, where every gesture influences the next, and where each element is constitutive of the one that follows.

Paul Wallach’s sculpture unfolds in space from a dynamic point which provokes an effect of suspension and weightlessness through volumes of air finely ringed in the space. If the artist uses different materials, his primary material is wood, a living medium with a mutable odor and touch, a material which evolves over time. The woods of Wallach’s sculptures, often varied within the same work or worked differently, are chosen with the greatest care for their density, their evolution in time, and the intention of each sculpture. Wallach has an intimate knowledge of wood, since he has worked in the medium from his earliest childhood, evaluating each tree as an absolute, living sculpture inserted in the middle of nature in all the diversity of its forms. There is no narration in these sculptures; there is even a resolutely provoked austerity which summons up the finest observation, as the work cannot be apprehended in a sole viewing; the experience is recomposed at every instant, according to the vision of the spectator. There is, in these works, an essential mobility inherent in their perception, a constant movement that calls for the spectators’ own movement, and leads them to a discovery of their own inner gravity. In multiplying our points of view of these sculptures that draw or drawings that sculpt, the artist enlarges the experience of our own bodies.

Paul Wallach’s works form a voyage to the heart of geometry and its multiple landscapes, as much spatio-temporal as those combined by our minds in a perception that always changes according to time, mood, light, our inner disposition, and our always-renewed sensory perception.

Two solo exhibitions have been organized by the gallery, “Falling Up” in 2010, and “heretofore” in 2013. In 2014, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Saint- Etienne gave Wallach an important exhibition, “WHERE WHAT WAS,” also presented in 2015 at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec. A catalog was published on this occasion with the support of the gallery. The sculpture La Madeleine was presented in the summer at the Chapelle Saint- Nicolas-des-eaux of Pluméliau for the 2015 Edition of L’art dans les Chapelles.