Composition — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 11 → July 22, 2016

For this exhibition, the gallery has decided to bring together the works of Knopp Ferro, Imi Knoebel, Bernard Moninot, Carmen Perrin, and Georges Rousse, based on the theme of composition. The works selected for this exhibition—drawings, sculptures, photographs, and collages—are compositions of lines and assemblies of forms and colours.

Knopp Ferro’s mobile works float in space or in a coloured space delineated by an acrylic glass box, and consist of assemblies of iron lines that are always slightly in movement, which characterises the work of this post-minimalist Austrian artist. In the drawing Tracés, nos lignes de fuite (’Traces: lines of flight’, 2016), Carmen Perrin joins up the countless perforations of a colour drawing with straight lines drawn with a ruler. She refers to them as ‘lines of flight’, as conceived by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1980): ‘We must invent our lines of flight, if we are able, and the only way we can invent them is by effectively drawing them, in our lives’; she reinterprets this philosophic concept via her plastic transposition. In the series Mémoire fossile (‘Fossil memory’), Bernard Moninot has invented constellations, and has used acrylic lines to link together hundreds of Pentacrines (Fossils dating from 200 millions years ago) found in the Jura.

In Las Vegas (2016), Georges Rousse has once again combined architecture, sculpture, painting, and photography. The choice of viewing angle has enabled the artist to fuse the vanishing lines in perspective, in a space transformed by an abstract construction in colour.

Far from the idea of perspective, but rather in a quest for equilibrium between form and colour—a fundamental aspect of his work—, Imi Knoebel’s series of ‘Positions’ are spaces composed of an assembly of painted rectangles and small floating elements of varying dimensions and in an infinite variety of tones and colours.