Guillaume Krattinger — Dans les Souffles — Virginie Louvet Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 17, 2017 → January 16, 2018

For his third solo show at the gallery, Guillaume Krattinger is presenting a series of photographs and sculptures not shown before.

Dans les souffles seems to imply that the void, the air can contain us, absorb us; that, within the elements, a concrete reality is intrinsically contained. It is probably what Turner sought to express in Snow Storm — Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s mouth and many other works. A sense of being at the center of a maelstrom of energy, of moving forces, like “a microcosm recreating in the manner of a macrocosm an open space where real life is possible.” (François Cheng)

Arrêter les vagues, for instance, is a plaster sculpture of a storm, a re-interpretation of marine art, showing a boxed-in scenery, like wind in a cage. Traces of the image remain — the frame, the glass. As in the photographs on the walls, the air is contained, the glass trapping the emptiness, making it a component of the piece. Glass and emptiness work together, at once containing, absorbing and acting as an extension, giving extra density to the elements. In the same way that light contaminates the mist.

That is the departure point for an exhibit that invites us to come closer to those impalpable “places” inhabited by winds, and to follow them where they rush in. In the hollow of forms and images we see appearing the hint of the vital principles animating their surface.

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Guillaume Krattinger was born in 1985.
He lives and works in Paris.