Benoît-Marie Moriceau — Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 11 → June 22, 2014

Estefania Penafiel Loaiza — Le Crédac En investissant le Crédac, qui occupe l’ancienne manufacture des Œillets, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza a souhaité mettre en lumière le passé de ce bâtiment ouvrier tout en imaginant la possibilité d’une persistance de sa présence, de son présent. À rebours, l’artiste fait émerger les formes lorsque celles-ci s’en sont allées.

The two solo exhibitions of Estefanìa Peñafiel Loaiza and Benoît-Marie Moriceau, running concomitantly at Le Crédac, mark a renewal of Claire Le Restif’s “Duo” exhibition series, her commitment to giving young artists a chance to show what they can do. Born in 1978 and 1980 respectively, Estefanìa Peñafiel Loaiza and Benoît-Marie Moriceau are from the same generation of artists, although they are meeting for the first time at Le Crédac.

It is no doubt their connections with the visible, the vestige, and memory, closely associated with the spatial and political context surrounding those links, that resonate in their work. Rather than seeking some common denominator between the two featured artists, the idea driving this series of exhibitions has been to provide a venue for a recent piece, often an on-site work, which would allow the artists to display their full measure. Occasionally a certain complicity does arise, but it is one that holds no obligations for the participants.

Estefanìa Peñafiel Loaiza — l’espace épisodique

Estefanìa Peñafiel Loaiza, born in Ecuador in 1978, came to France in 2002 to continue her art studies, initially at the Beaux- arts school in Paris and subsequently Lyon.

She has constructed her work around the tension between the visible and the invisible. Invited to exhibit at Le Crédac in 2007, for example, she produced an almost imperceptible piece entitled mirages(s) 2. ligne imaginaire, équateur (2007), a long rubber line on the wall at eye level running parallel to the floor. Like the way one indicates the horizon, this line, radical and precise at one and the same time, conjures up the imaginary line of the equator in her native Ecuador.

Peñafiel Loaiza has continued to adhere to this esthetic position and the striking economy it shows in the means it employs. There is a play of appropriation and subversion that takes shape, for instance, in acts of destruction (pages with holes, erased ink, rubbed out images) and reconstruction (backwards reading and rewriting) which are perpetrated against images and language. This plastic dimension, however, does not exclude a political position that generates meaning. A vector of memory, the invisible mass of nameless persons —demonstrators, immigrants, extras and supporting roles in movies—is brought to light through traces that are themselves imperceptible.

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Sismographies 2. Entrenerfs (détail), 2013 Livres, cire noire — 353 × 75,5 × 86,5 cm Courtesy Galerie Alain Gutharc — Photo © Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza

At the Manufacture des Œillets, the former eyelet factory that is now home to Le Crédac, Peñafiel Loaiza intends to conjure up the earlier use of the site, that is, labor, the noise of machines, mechanical operations. In this building, constructed in 1913 from the American “Daylight Factory” model, daylight once punctuated the machine pace of the work. The artist is focusing on this aspect of the venue, which is inseparable from the world of the working classes, and will be doing art work in the center’s exhibition galleries, as well as the oldest part of the site (the Manufacture’s Main Hall), specifically its clock. The large clock that parceled out the working day of the laborers is now stopped and only its light continues to function.

Benoît-Marie Moriceau — Rien de plus tout du moins

In 2007 in Rennes, at 40mcube’s invitation, Benoît-Marie Moriceau used black paint to completely cover the old house where the exhibition space was then located. That first intervention can be considered Benoît-Marie Moriceau’s masterful entry into the world of contemporary art. Taking its highly filmic title Psycho from the movies, this masterpiece could have “crushed” the young artist. He has since convinced attentive viewers of his ability to evolve through the formats of a wide range of interventions, from the most spectacular to the most invisible, while always infusing the chosen venue with an atmosphere, a climate of uncanniness, oddity, something inexplicable or eerie.

Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Scaling Housing Unit, 2013 Tentes de parois, sacs, casques, mousquetons, cordes — Production Tripode et Zoo galerie, avec le soutien de la DRAC Bretagne — Dimensions variables Courtesy Benoît-Marie Moriceau / Adagp, 2014 — Photo © Philippe Piron.

Moriceau begins with a context, a given place in which he integrates the mechanisms of representation. He seems to be attempting to carry out one of the rules laid down by certain artists starting in the 1970s, that of the “total installation”. He deploys a wealth of means to modify and dramatize the site he is taking over. During his last exhibition in September 2013, for example, at the Galerie Mélanie Rio, a possible film scenario was playing out between the lines, as it were, during the show’s run. It involved reviving a domestic dimension to the town house where the gallery was located, notably with the artist’s reinstalling a dining table in the reception hall, and inviting children to play a building game in front of a chimney fire. Visitors to the show played the main role simply by their presence.

Benoît-Marie Moriceau, The shape of things to come, Le centre des télécommunications, 2010 Exposition Ce qui vient — Les Ateliers de Rennes — Commande publique de la DRAC Bretagne — Impression numérique sur panneau — 400 × 300 cm Courtesy Benoît-Marie Moriceau / Adagp, 2014 — Photo © André Morin

Following a process of careful observation of the space occupied by Le Crédac and the center’s daily workings, the artist will arrange “exhibition situations,” like so many shifts back and forth between the inside and the outside. Moriceau will be working with the large hall, which is almost entirely enclosed in glass, a veritable promontory that affords a priceless view of the city.

It is a sure bet that with Benoît-Marie Moriceau’s work, a venue is never a guarantee that it will respect the function it was originally designed for, quite the opposite.