Frédéric Poincelet — S NS T TR — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 5 → December 23, 2016

The Galerie Catherine Putman is delighted to present ‘S NS T TR’, the new exhibition of Frédéric Poincelet’s work.

Most of Frédéric Poincelet’s drawings bear the title ‘untitled’: they have no names and no story to tell; we do not really know what they are, but that does not matter. The absence of titles given to the works, the book, and the exhibition is complemented by an absence of vowels—a way of immediately introducing a bizarre note, which is inherent in all his drawings. The new drawings take the viewer on a journey in a series of mysterious abandoned places in a sate of eruption, following on from ‘Apocalypse’ (exhibition held in the gallery in February 2014). Frédéric Poincelet presents a series of landscapes, appropriations of images compiled here and there. The large-scale drawings are sometimes ‘inhabited’: a little girl, a nude couple in a living room, a woman farmer, and so on. Still drawing on the same smooth and slightly yellowed paper, his work with the Bic pen has developed, experimenting with empty and filled spaces, and areas of emphasis and release. The colour, ink washes with which he prepares the paper, which timidly appeared in his 2013 works, has become more evident and more daring, sometimes even quite outrageous.

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‘(…) I believe that Frédéric Poincelet’s work is not resigned to not being beautiful. He enjoys reading Sagan. In the opening pages of Bonjour Tristesse, she wrote: “(…) I felt vaguely uncomfortable with anyone devoid of physical charms. Their resignation to the fact that they were unattractive seemed to me somehow indecent.” There is, perhaps, something of this in Frédéric Poincelet’s drawings, in the struggle between drawing and colour and between melancholy and joy.’ Anaël Pigeat, “Le Souvenir du Beau”, July 2016¹.

‘S NS T TR’ * is also the title of the first book about the artist’s drawings, which will be published in November, and co-published by Editions Michel Lagarde and Galerie Catherine Putman. This book, designed by Frédéric Poincelet, is a veritable book of images, which brings together an extensive—though not entirely exhaustive—collection of drawings produced over a ten-year period. The texts are placed in a notebook in the middle of the book: “Le Souvenir du Beau”, written by Anaël Pigeat, and an interview with Frédéric Poincelet conducted by Joseph Ghosn. The separation between the text and the images reinforces the plastic force of the works independently from any narrative idea, as has always been affirmed by one of the founders of Frédéric Magazine, in which drawings speak for themselves.

In the interview, Frédéric Poincelet picks up on a phrase by Joseph Ghosn: the ‘magic reinvention of the real’; it is in this state of shifting from dreams to reality that the ambiguity of his drawings lies. Incongruous situations and imaginary landscapes are created with ultra-realistic minutiae. A rupture in the space, a strange detail, or a mistake disconcerts us, and now colours add to this unreal and psychedelic quality.

¹ ‘S NS T TR’, texts by Anaël Pigeat and Joseph Ghosn, 128 pages, Éditions Michel Lagarde and Galerie Catherine Putman, Paris, 2016.

Twenty copies are complemented by a series of four original serigraphs, proofed and signed by the artist.