Bernard Moninot — Chambre d’écho — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 15 → May 4, 2018

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting Chambre d’Écho, Bernard Moninot’s second solo exhibition, from 15 March to 4 May 2018. This exhibition is produced in conjunction with Galerie Catherine Putman, also in Paris, which will be showing Moninot’s Cadastre between the same dates.

The show’s central work, also titled Chambre d’Écho, is a spatialised drawing accompanied by several other drawings. Two other series, Cadastre and Clinamen round off the exhibition.

The complex, spectacular outcome of five years’ work, Chambre d’Écho (2012–2017) is a spatialised expression of the trajectory of memory and the work of time. Jean-Luc Nancy’s “strange recollection of something never consigned to memory” could readily serve as its subtitle.
This work conjures up the echo phenomenon we have all experienced in the mountains, when sound waves are reflected back to their source by reverberation.
The structure is a cube measuring 136 × 310 × 191 cm — a kind of room housing clues to a narrative in the form of four sequences: a cabin with its “Sound Chandelier”; the “Curtain of Patience”, a transparent acrylic painting of a glacier; and seven “Memory Objects” slipped behind the curtain, lit up by reflections from a sentence by René Char cut out in mirror glass: “Only the eyes are still able to utter a cry.”
Facing the installation are archival materials relating to its development: 14 drawings measuring 55 × 75 cm, concertina-folded notebooks and a model.

Two other series of works from 2016 and 2017 are also on show. Clinamen and Cadastre are, respectively, groups of paintings and drawings on transparent surfaces, whose very different styles testify to a marked change in Moninot’s drawing practice.

Worked on daily during the winter months of 2017, the 28.5 × 22 cm drawings of Cadastre add up to a kind of calendar mapped onto a territory: a drawing a day, like a mental weather bulletin.

Clinamen is a group of 52.5 × 41 cm paintings made with an acrylic ruling pen on two transparent surfaces, in which networks of colour interlace and outline areas.