Emmanuel Régent — Le triangle de Vespucci

Exhibition

Drawing, painting, sculpture

Emmanuel Régent
Le triangle de Vespucci

Past: October 19 → December 8, 2012

Emmanuel Régent boasts a rich calendar for 2012, with no less than five personal exhibitions across France. His work will be exhibited in the near future at the Galerie Contemporaine of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMAC) in Nice: Sortir de son lit en parlant d’une rivière1 (dernière définition). Le triangle de Vespucci2 gives the artist and the Galerie Bertrand Baraudou the opportunity to echo this first monographic museum exhibition.

At the MAMAC, the scenography enables to have a global approach of the various media, materials and concepts approached by the artist. It gathers his sanded paintings on canvas and his large drawings on paper around Valles Marineris, an immense ten-meter long wall made up of 40 blocks of stainless steel in the likeness of cut stone. The whole recreates a ruin whose metallic shards are strewn across the floor, giving the disconcerting impression of a futuristic relic.

At the gallery, Emmanuel Régent replays this partition by exhibiting his latest sanded paintings and drawings, as well as Bloc, a sculptural work from 2007 which inspired the 1Valles Marineris wall.

As an attentive observer of the ever-growing flow of images in today’s world, of the dizzying speed at which they are transferred, Emmanuel Régent develops an approach centered on deletion and disappearance by way of monochrome paintings sanded on canvas, of objects covered with silver or gold, of paper sculptures or of black felt pen drawings representing queuing people or seascapes.

“I draw almost every day, with a particular interest in what represents slowness, waiting, emptiness or absence. Using a black felt pen, I draw boulders on the seaside or queues of extremely various disciplined figures, be it outside a museum, a cinema or a theater, which could also recall dark times in history. It is in this potential shift that I am interested, this relation to the uncertainty and fragility of the visible […] I set up unstable appearance principles so as to encourage the beholder to fill absences. Making use of very simple processes and materials, questioning the invisible communication systems created by new technologies, the circulation of images and the disappearance of their tangible carriers […] How new technologies and their images can influence a classical way of going about painting, and how this sanding process enables me to rediscover the light of the screen (from behind) through the sole use of acrylic paint on the canvas. Digital space imagery, medical images produced by scanners and MRI, heat curves, provide bases for my work.”3

Emmanuel Régent, who was born in Nice, lives and works in Paris and Villefranche-sur-mer where he has his studio. He graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2000 and is represented by Espace A VENDRE (Nice), the Bertrand Baraudou gallery (Paris) and Caroline Smulders / I love my job (Paris). In 2009, Emmanuel Régent was awarded the “Découverte” prize by Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo where, the following year, was shown his personal exhibition titled Mes plans sur la comète / Drifting away.

In this way, Emmanuel Régent proposes “lacks” to be completed by vision. It is a question of “creating open projection spaces, spaces for assumptions, spaces for wandering, scattering…”, of imposing gaps, rhythms, as breaks against breathlessness.

1 Second definition of the French verb “divaguer” in the Littré dictionary.

2 “Vespucci’s triangle”, or “Triangulum Australe”, is a small constellation in the southern hemisphere whose three brightest stars form an equilateral triangle.

3 Révolution silencieuse, a discussion with Daria de Beauvais, in Mes plans sur la comète / Drifting away, 2010, Palais de Tokyo.

  • Opening Friday, October 19, 2012 2 PM → 9 PM
Baraudou Schriqui Galerie Gallery
Map Map
11 Bastille Zoom in 11 Bastille Zoom out

62, rue Saint-Sabin

75011 Paris

T. 09 53 47 41 62

www.galeriebaraudou.com

Richard-Lenoir
Saint-Sébastien – Froissart

Opening hours

Tuesday – Saturday, 2 PM – 7 PM
Other times by appointment

The artist

  • Emmanuel Régent