Group Show #1 — Exposition collective des artistes de la galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 17 → April 28, 2012

The Galerie 13 Jeannette Mariani presents the exhibition Group Show #1 gathering works by artists Anne Brunet, Sabrina Montiel-Soto, Pepe Lopez et Koharutie.

To the virtual harems of pornography, Anne Brunet opposes the candour of a world populated with plump monsters and child women. Powerful tattoo graphics, details of scales and the volutes of Japanese woodblock prints, gothic romanticism, the playful tenderness of manga : Anne Brunet seems to do her utmost to find a link among all these contemporary expressions.

Somwhere between cinéma and sculpture, Sabrina Montiel-Soto creates films, miniature sculptures and « immersive » installations. The works of this Venezuelan artist are not simple ready-made, but real poetic and metaphysical tales. They teach us a lesson in sillent contemplation, like an act of résistance against the immediacy and roughness of contemporary visual information.

Venezuelan artist Pepe López beckons his audience to confront the reality of global consumerism throuh cultural codes of society. By painting recognizable logos on traditional Venezuelan baskets, López utilizes marketing strategies to illuminate the realities of global production, connecting a commercial image with its forgotten origin. These baskets, symbols of Venezuelan culture that are traditionally used to carry food, have been stripped of their customary function to become the very product of consumption, ultimately engaging in the global trade itself. By using traditional materials and pigments, López not only displaces the labels of major fashion houses and images of pop culture, but he also transforms these simple objects into allegorical representations of his very protestation.

Japanese artist Koharutie transgresses the codes of a genre to invent a new one : Emo-Pop Art, or the art of giving shape to one’s anguish from images made to express any other feeling. Mixing the most fecund naïveté and the strictest introspection, the works thus created represent the paradoxes of all our generation : what if innocence was but a dream — and suffering, the early warning sign of our redemption ?