Delphine Coindet — Modes & Usages de l’art — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 10 → June 28, 2015

Les vernissages d’avril 2015 Découvrez notre sélection de vernissages d’expositions du mois d'avril 2015.

Delphine Coindet — Le Crédac, Ivry Les œuvres, pour la plupart sculpturales, de Delphine Coindet interrogent depuis vingt ans les codes de la représentation, confrontant l’art au design et questionnant sa représentation. Dix ans après « La Belle Hypothèse », l’artiste revient au Crédac avec « Modes & usages de l’art ».

For some twenty years now, Delphine Coindet has been developing a sculptural language through collages and assemblages of widely varying materials and techniques, as well as arrangements of the exhibition itself, treating the display space as an open mise en scène. The inventiveness of her style, which generates an endless dialog with architecture and design, is articulated today around a broad palette of experimental works that includes the art exhibition itself of course, as well as theater design, performance, publically commissioned art, and the creation of radical furniture.

Delphine Coindet, Workshop view, CIRVA / the International Center for Research in Glass and the Plastic Arts, Marseille, 2014 Photo : CIRVA — © Delphine Coindet / Adagp Paris, 2015

Crédac is proud to continue its long-term collaboration with Delphine Coindet, which goes back over a decade. This most recent project is part of an unusual work arrangement in association with CIRVA (the International Center for Research in Glass and the Plastic Arts, Marseille). In 2014 the two institutions, moved by a common desire, invited the artist to work with experienced artisanal glassblowers in a material that was entirely new to her practice, glass. The artist has come up with forms that take advantage of both the virtuosity of the craftsmen’s technical expertise and chance, the accidental, leaving room for the creation of a series of variations in terms of color and texture.

Delphine Coindet, Workshop view, CIRVA / the International Center for Research in Glass and the Plastic Arts, Marseille, 2014 Photo : CIRVA — © Delphine Coindet / Adagp Paris, 2015

The title of the show, Modes & Usages de l’art (Modes and Uses of Art), may come as a surprise with its didactic character in the style of a user’s manual or an old-fashioned magazine. But questions concerning the function of art and its modes of production and representation lie at the heart of this exhibition project. The works presented at Crédac suggest useful objects that have been shorn of their utilitarian function and now display, for the visitor’s appreciation, their purely plastic power and symbolic weight. Playing on the vacillating ambiguity between art and design, the artist questions the heritage of domestic conventions that orchestrate the interiors of our living spaces. Transitional, narcissistic, ritual, what indeed are our connections with the objects around us?

Coindet invites us to wander through three succeeding environments, slipping from public to private space in which recent and new works produced at CIRVA can be seen side by side. Analogies are created from one factory to the other, from the workshop to the art center, where Coindet’s pieces, the very stuff of transparency, present a visual echo of the bay-window architecture of the industrial building that is home to Crédac.