Jérôme Allavena, Sandra Aubry & Sébastien Bourg, Pierre-Laurent Cassière, Chloé Dugit-Gros — x, y, z, & t — Anne Barrault Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 23 → July 28, 2012

Man grasps space continually, time rules his life. The artist creates his work in two or three dimensions, he chases time. The ticking of a handless clock governs this exhibition. What time is it? Where are we? What are we looking at? These works are in what they grasp: space-time. Mathematics represent space and time as two inseparable notions influencing each other, space-time has four dimensions: three for space, x, y, z, and one for time, t.

Jérôme Allavena, Sandra Aubry et Sébastien Bourg, Pierre-Laurent Cassière, Chloé Dugit-Gros play on this impalpable matter which draws toward mental and physical reflection.

With the irritating noise of this clock and their spatial puzzle, Sandra Aubry and Sébastien Bourg mislead us in the maze of time and of space. While the clock has lost its original function and only gives the beat of time, the diptych No signal (2011) and More no signal (2011) disturbs the viewer. In front of this myriad of white points, we do not really know what we are looking at. Is it intergalactic space, a zoom on a planet, a new star?

Pierre-Laurent Cassière’s two straight Angles (2011) divide the same architectural space, and yet. Our visual and mental perception of these three straight lines delimiting three plane areas is unsettled. A rectangular volume, not a physical one but a sensory one, appears, according to the viewer’s moves and the reflection of the light interacting with graphite and India ink.

Dramatizing space and quickening time somehow, Chloé Dugit-Gros builds, deconstructs, and rebuilds an architectural space. While buildings, modern and contemporary structures disappear as fast as they appear in her video Prestidigitation #2 (2011), geometrical forms are superimposed in her drawings on tracing paper. The way they show through creates a depth of field and goes beyond the three dimensions.

With his video Niveaux (2008), Jérôme Allavena gives us a new spatiotemporal idea of photography. The artist dissects the various layers of the aspect of a photograph, by showing the contour lines of a digital shot. In the same way, from the sketch to the making of the cube, to graphics, the artist presents the different stages of its volume I love it when a plan develops smoothly (2011). Creating space is compared to the time it takes to draw its lines.

These artists do upset our visual and sensory referents and make us know new emotional feelings. The confrontation is straightforward and reveals to us what we are not aware of for lack or out of habit.