Drawing Now Paris 2011 — Galeries européennes — Carrousel du Louvre — Fair — Slash Paris

Past: March 25 → 28, 2011

Perugi Artecontemporanea, Padoue, Italie

Jason Mclean

McLean’s work can certainly not be described as “hard edged” abstraction. The presence of the illusion of perspective, whilst interpreted in a non-academic way, alludes to the mental space where the artist re-elaborates the flow of information which lays siege to us every day.

An indication of direction, swirling marks made in an agitated way, eyes, intestines, and fading writing expand across the paper like the growth of a rhizome. It is an overflowing of simultaneous images. The artist has a strong sense of colour, line and rhythm which emerges in the collision of hyperbolic brush marks, thick and dry. It is a painting which seems to re-propose issues of some of the most significant trends of American art of the twentieth century. Mc Lean’s convulsive, almost “automatic”, writing seems to bring together the opulent and cruel surrealism of one such as Gorky with the lively irony of street art. From abstract expressionism we find abstraction by chance, in particular, by using stains, smudges and unfinished forms, the artist suggests an interdependence between order and chaos. It is all too easy for a painter to hide their own mistakes, but McLean is interested in showing human nature like this, as it really is: with his “corrections” left there to be carried out and his dilemmas unresolved.

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, Londres, Angleterre

Patrick Heide Contemporary Art fosters an international range of emerging and mid-career artists. The program ranges from the politically motivated projects of Thomas Kilpper and the anthropological sculptures of Francesco Pessina to the playfully yet obsessively executed abstract canvases of Karoly Keserü. The gallery is particularly dedicated to the medium of drawing by showing exceptional works like the systematic drawing series by Isabel Albrecht, the alienating Photocopy Drawings by Alex Hamilton and the movement based installations by Sharon Louden.

Isabel Albrecht, Z9-2010, 2010 Graphite sur papier — 32 × 21,5 cm Courtesy Patrick Heide Contemporary Art

Hein Elferink Gallery, Staphorst, Pays-Bas

Linda Karshan, Untitled, 2009 76 × 56 cm Courtesy galerie Hein Elferink

Ditesheim Gallery, Neuchâtel, Suisse

Erik Desmazières, La machine à remonter le temps, 2010 Plume, pinceau, lavis d’encre de Chine sur vélin blanc — 26 × 18 cm Courtesy Galerie Ditesheim

Römerapotheke Gallery, Zürich, Suisse

There are no great gestures, no posing, no breaching of taboos, no reference to current topics. His images of alienation from reality exist outside of time. They portray mortality and losing one’s grip on reality in pictures which are unspectacular. Pictures in which what the beam of a pocket torch makes fleetingly visible reveals only that what you are looking for is not there in what has been shown. Marcel Gähler, born in 1969, has found his own way as a painter. Gähler only ever suggests. He allows flashes of light to break through the darkness and an even deeper darkness to emerge from the impenetrable blackness of the night. Here too, the uncanny derives not from hints of past crimes or lurking monsters. His painting drives us towards the limits of our perception. It makes it disconcertingly clear that seeing nothing does not imply that nothing is there. Gähler understands how to create a vacuum and then punctuate it with shafts of seeing. When Marcel Gähler’s camera flashes in the darkness of night, his photograph captures a world asleep. His are views of familiar but forgotten places, often in rain or snow. It might be an allotment with shrivelled, overgrown vegetable foliage, a trace of last summer amid remains of an improvised greenhouse, the front wall of a house behind a garden shrub, or a tree-top pointing skywards. Gähler bases oil paintings, watercolours and spectacularly detailed pencil drawings on these photographs. The real content of the photograph is highlighted by this transposition. What a superficial glance might previously have missed now emerges, subtly reinforced, in his pictures.

These are images which lie at the interface between casual snapshot and meaningful allusion. Thus they create a motif-like state of suspense, open to free interpretation. They recall lost memories, summon up dream sequences. The ongoing daily loss of universe comes into view, captured on paper.ion.

Frédéric de Senarclens

Marcel Gähler, Untitled (Z_2010_09), 2010 Crayon sur papier — 6 × 9 cm Courtesy galerie Römerapotheke

YS Gallery, Bruxelles, Belgique

Chiaki Kamikawa, Deer tribe in the mountain, 0 38 × 28,8 cm Courtesy galerie d’YS

Zink Gallery, München, Allemagne

Marcel Van Eeden, Untitled (A cutlet Vaudeville Show), 2010 Crayon de noir et couleur sur papier à la main — 9 × 28 cm Courtesy galerie Kink Munchen, Berlin

Michael Sturm Gallery, Stuttgart, Allemagne

The gallery’s particular passion is painting and colour in all their variety of aspects, starting with material-based monochrome artists like Marcia Hafif, up to colour as visual phenomenon like in the work of Bridget Riley and colour-based installations in space by artists such as Russell Maltz or Kirstin Arndt.

Brigitte Stahl’s uses founded objects — things that have been casted away, discarded things, disused things — and simple, prepared materials. With those she creates new objects whose brittle charm is waking a memory in the viewers mind that is too abstract to be realized. Her early Installations, Objectsculptures and Paperworks pointed in dispensed strain on a higher interrelation. In contrast to that her latest artworks are autonomic formations of an excited dynamic which is in a precarious balance between tectonic movement and flighty instability. Brigitte Stahl’s methode, working with finds, is known in art for very long time. But the way she is working with them poses old questions on the object, the art and the object as art again and makes them to new questions. In her artworks especial the objects without any material worth are getting the mystery of an existence. Stahl displaces them of their original function and opens them to a complex consideration. The recovering of an aesthetic form in the already existing is an aspect which can be found in all of Stahl’s artwork. Chary but with emphasis she guides the viewers attention on the worlds of hidden things and their aesthetic quality beyond the usage.

And the galleries: Aliceday, Bruxelles, Belgique / Analix Forever, Genève, Suisse / Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin, Allemagne / Werner Klein Gallery, Köln, Allemagne/ Galerie Van Der Mieden, Anvers, Belgique / Nosbaum and Reding, Luxembourg / Pierre Hallet Gallery, Bruxelles, Belgique / Rupert Pfab Gallery, Düsseldorf Allemagne / Hengevoss-Dürkop Gallery, Hambourg, Allemagne / Charlotte Moser Gallery, Genève, Suisse / Schau Ort. Christiane Büntgen, Zürich, Suisse / Kudlek van der Grinten Gallery, Cologne, Allemagne.