Gilles Balmet — Looking Through the Window — Dominique Fiat Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 7 → October 19, 2013

New works on paper from Gilles Blamet will be exhibited, linking aesthetic researches about images, landscape and abstraction, using ink wash or paint manipulated in baths with specific protocols. This exhibition will also feature Family business, a conceptual project exhibited at the same time in another configuration at the Destiny Museum of Los Angeles with Courtesy gallery.

Gilles Balmet comes from a family of stained glass-makers in Grenoble. One room of the exhibition will be devoted to the Family business project which consists in a series of drawings made by rubbing black chalk onto different objects related to his studio : The copper plates of the family business workshop that four generations have occupied and the “Art deco” glass made by his great-grandfather Louis Balmet in 1924. The design is based on a stained glass window and its frame and which retains the black on paper , allowing a minimal reinterpretation of the original work. The stain glass is transposed from the family room to the gallery stucturing the other drawings, fulfilling them with other indications and signs allowing an historical, sociological and poetic analysis of the transmission and mutations of the family workshop.

This exhibition will also feature new polyptychs from series Silver mountains and Silver reliefs, which are gestural drawings obtained by dipping and handling sheets of black paper in baths of silver paint. Fantastic mountain landscapes or photo-realistic, referring to silver films arise from these paintings manipulations and question boundaries between painting and photography, as well as the importance of gesture in the drawing. New works from the Double Waterfalls triptychs series followed by the Waterfalls (minimal) series will be exhibited. These works are variations close to the limit of abstraction also questioning the idea of landscapes. These series are made with fine ink droplets dissolved in a bath where the fluid that escapes, create a sensual dynamic reminding a drape or a dreamlike space.

Darker works appeared with series Rubber Soul and Champs de Bataille, both made by using a window squeegee and a complex mixture of inks. Quiet devastated landscapes with bluish tones that recall the trenches of Verdun are revealed by scraping ink on paper. Preceding these series and his six-month stay in Japan in 2010, Gilles Balmet already worked with squeegees and ink on a set of unpublished works which became Kyoto premonition, creating images that may symbolize Japanese urban landscapes made of tangled buildings surrounded by lush vegetation.

Ciels variables’s set deploys subtle tones obtained by a transfer on paper of inks recovered by tissues placed on the ground collecting ink discharges from other series of works while drying . These random delicate mixtures question our ability to project our ideas according to an image.