Exposition d’inauguration de l’espace Marais — Suzanne Tarasieve, Marais Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 13 → July 30, 2011

Suzanne Tarasieve Gallery inaugurates its second space at 7 rue Pastourelle, in the Marais. This first exhibition features the work of Delphine Balley, Nick Cave, Angelika Markul, Eddie Martinez, Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, Pierre Schwerzmann.

Delphine Balley

Delphine Balley, a graduate of the National School of Photography in Arles, stands at the crossroads between the practices of visual artists and photography.

Album de famille is a series composed of old, unpublished photographs as well as objects “taken” from the images produced by the artist. The set of photographs is a visual and narrative development of a story whose point of departure is fictional : 2002, Saint-Laurent-en-Royans, Delphine Balley dies a violent death. Since 2002, Delphine Balley pursues this series dedicated to her own family. Behind the banality of the title and what it evokes, a world is being built where the cliché (the wedding, the birthday, the dinner) cannot match the phantasmagoria emanating from the photographs of the artist. Each image of Delphine Balley has this potential of strangeness that creates unrest, and therefore the beginning of a story. Album de famille confuses fiction and reality and the uneasiness it provokes is accentuated by exposure, besides the photographs of some of the objects invented by Delphine Balley.

Nick Cave

The artist studied textile arts at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Today he is professor and head of the Fashion Design Department at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nick Cave is a sculptor, dancer and performance artist. He is known for his Soundsuits, exposed at the Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève for the first time in France. These extravagant, colorful and bright sculptures, whose name comes from the rattling noise of the first prototype, have been assembled to present his whole work in a traveling exhibition that began in March in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Art Center. Nick Cave has been part of the collective exhibition 30 Americans organized by the Rubell Family Collection / Contemporary Arts Foundation. His works are described as a cross between carnival, an African ceremony and haute couture.

In an explosion of colors and textures, Cave relies on his extensive knowledge of many disciplines (textile arts, fashion design and dance), to create powerful sculptural combinations and unusual pieces made of found objects. The Soundsuits are composed of materials such as buttons, tabs, plastic beads, potholders, metal flowers, twigs, tops and human hair. Some have heavy headgear made of ceramic flowers, birds, or rabbits. They are designed to allow a complete sensory experience. One characteristic of Nick Caveʼs work is to push his art beyond the limits of the exhibition gallery. It blurs the boundaries between visual art and performance. The dance then makes us forget the object and the one who animates it (the dancer) to make room for the sound and the movement.

Angelika Markul

Angelika Markul, former student of Christian Boltanski, has successfully filled spaces such as the Théâtre de Chaillot, the MAC / VAL, the Center for Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland : depending on the place or the assigned project, the artist knows how to recreate her universe through the choice of materials, lights and the staging of her work.

Migration(s) is an installation with which Angelika Markul traces the multiple lives of plastic, her favorite material, while reaffirming the foundations of her work nourished with repetition, reuse and recovery. By recycling the black plastic previously used in Monte Negro (Installation, 2011, Les Nuits Parisiennes, Atrium of the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton), the artist depicts the end of the journey of the material, which, from the state of overabundance transits towards imprisonment or death. Embedded in heavy glass boxes, this agricultural plastic Angelika Markul contemplated as a child in the polish countryside, the same one she left proliferating at Louis Vuitton, now seems stuck for life, suffocating in a sterile environment and impossible to access.

Between exuberance and isolation, appeasement and anxiety, Migration(s) offers an obsessional journey that is more about the artist than the matter. Determined to submit the black plastic to endless reincarnations, Angelika Markul offers the viewer an immersion into her creative process and the multiple migrations inside her memory. Angelika Markul translates complex feelings with few means and an acute sense for the occupation of space : anxiety, eroticism, mourning, rebirth, tearing, liberation. The installations of the artist reveal a scenographic and narrative scheme.

Eddie Martinez

Eddie Martinez briefly attended the art school in Boston, but he spent more time on the streets drawing on walls. The artist possesses the exceptional gifts of the painter and of the illustrator which he combines with exuberance. In a rich and surprising composition, with a very personal style, he mixes chance and technique. Eddie Martinez seeks to capture the chaotic nature of life in his paintings. He plays with the depth of space and challenges us to discern precisely the various elements shown. Portraits, still lifes, landscapes… He gives us an ocean of information through which he navigates skillfully. This pile-up of forms reflects his obsession to capture on canvas the transience of daily life : conversations, ideas, thoughts. All this, which gives such spontaneity and freshness to his works, recounts a personal iconography that evolves and develops from one series to another. As in the work of A. Gorky or W. De Kooning, the idea is to keep a flat shape while giving the idea of volume.

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison

A couple of American photographers, Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison have worked and exhibited for nearly twenty years. These artists produce images with narrative qualities: imaginary representations of man and nature. An absurd staging denounces a world where nature is domesticated, controlled, and destroyed: fabricated worlds made of strange floating clouds, senseless machines … This work poetically explores the influence of technology on the life of man and his environment. These photographs combine and juxtapose a past and a modern world. Architect’s Brother, series produced between 1993 and 2005, is seen as one of their most accomplished achievements. Every detail is carefully worked to form a set of extreme consistency. Robert ParkeHarrison explains “In my black suit, I seek to represent the archetype of modern man. In my pictures, I embody at the same time an inventor, a scientist, a guard and an idiot”.

Pierre Schwerzmann

The work of Pierre Schwerzmann reveals an exploration of the simple elements of the picture (frame, canvas, size) and of the multiple renditions of the formal possibilities of painting. While working on the spatial relationship of painting and support, Schwerzmann questions the flatness of the painting and the illusionism of the pictorial field. The hanging of the works — thought in terms of circulation — takes the exhibition space into account and determines a plural reading.

The various explorations of illusionism and the flatness of the canvas, the denial of subjectivity through the focus on neutral colors applied mechanically, the ambiguity of the status of the work (object or painting) are all formal exercises that are reminiscent of some concerns specific to minimal art, to extract its iconography or to transform this style into a consumable object by inserting it into a simulated decoration. Schwerzmann uses the visual language of minimal art as a mere working tool to generate artistic processes.

If Schwerzmannʼs work starts from a reflection related to minimal art, its outcome offers the opposite result: contrary to the minimal object that is defined by an insignificant presence — Donald Juddʼs “specific object”, for instance, which possesses the quality of not telling anything, of being insignificant — the work of Schwerzmann shows object paintings which are never there for themselves, since they are characterized by their transitivity.

Excerpts from the text of Marc-Olivier Wahler, written for the personal exhibition of the artist at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, from 18 July to 1 November 1992.