Julie Legrand & Romain Rivière — Backslash Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 16 → June 22, 2013

Backslash Gallery is delighted to invite you to the first of a series of exhibitions designed as a correspondence showcasing the different worlds of the guest artists. A new cycle will begin each spring, offering an intimate view of a rich and varied selection of artistic expressions as conveyed by a group of contemporary young artists. This first event draws the viewer into a conversation between Julie Legrand and Romain Rivière, two artists whose recurrent explorations of certain specific themes and media result in an approach that borders on the serial, if not obsessional. The gallery space offers a window onto their favorite media: glass for Julie Legrand and photography for Romain Rivière. The exhibition design is dense and powerful, creating a dialogue between the two different artistic worlds.

Julie Legrand subjects glass to a series of disconcerting investigations, producing visual caprices that shake up the viewer’s perception. The artist confronts the material’s fragility with coarser elements, such as a motorcycle tire or sponge, and inculcates the resulting whole with her off-beat vision. The glass seems to opt for self-imposed withdrawal, as though wishing to escape from the ambiguity that forces it into opposition with the material it is paired with.

“My installations are rooted in a relationship between stasis and movement. Most of them, even when they don’t actually move, contain a tension, weighing, pushing, pressing, gripping, interlinking, flowing, pouring, attracting, drawing together.”

Julie Legrand

Romain Rivière’s photographs lie on the dividing line between the most direct form of aestheticism and social analysis. The beautifully controlled images hint at a hidden and caustic analysis of the current antinomies that characterize our civilization, pointing to the heightened desires of a conflicting Western world. They are advertising signs dreamed up by the artist but photographed from behind, as though to lend them an innocuous or even uncertain air, despite their highly colored and loudly assertive facades. They are fisherman’s huts teetering between images of the favela and the Western dream of getting back to nature. But the huts go up in flames, highlighting the possible obsolescence of a world built on contradiction, pulled between the different utopias that govern our societies.