Kevin Rouillard — Crafted Lines: Echoes & Assemblage — Xippas Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 16 days: January 11 → March 1, 2025

Xippas gallery is pleased to present a personal exhibition by Kevin Rouillard in it’s Paris location. Entitled Crafted Lines : Echoes & Assemblage, it brings together a newly created body of work.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an interview between the artist and Cédric Fauq, chief curator at CAPC, Bordeaux.

Kevin Rouillard explores here the horizon line well beyond its conventional definition presenting it as a visual limit, one where the distance between sky and earth has become so small that these two parts seem to merge together. By investing the gallery walls, the artist uses this line, both as an element of formal vocabulary, specific to each work, but also as a visual tool capable of redefining our perception of the architecture where the works are hung.

The allusion to a distant landscape is signified by an overall geometry which includes a repetition of colored stripes creating a rhythmical order and visual resonances. Far from neglecting the aesthetic field of the abstract painting defined by Clement Greenberg, Rouillard offers here a universe where each metal work echoes the previous one and where the assembled colors create spaces for contemplation.

As for the technique used — the welding of strips of metal — it reveals to the viewer that gesture and material are closely linked and that their combination can alter our perception and feeling of space.

Born in 1989 in Vendôme, France, Kevin Rouillard lives and works in Bordeaux.

The artist creates installations and wall sculptures from large cans and containers that he flattens by hammering them. He often brings together sheets of metal that he welds together to create compositions which seem both complex and simple, since they are made with “poor” materials. Imposing and playing on reflections and material, they result from a process inspired by a logic of recycling.

Kevin Rouillard was graduated with honors from ENSBA in Paris in 2014. He participated to the 60th Salon de Montrouge and to the prize of Villa Emerige (Empiristes) in 2015. The same year, he also won the Foundation François de Hatvany prize. Since 2016 his work was included in the exhibition Distopark, at Confort Moderne in Poitiers, at Les Abattoirs, FRAC Midi-Pyrénées, Toulouse, at l’Assaut de la Menuiserie, Saint-Etienne and at The Chimney, New York, alongside with a group show with Centre d’Art Parc Saint Léger. Following the SAM Art Projects prize received in 2018, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris hosted his personal exhibition Le Grand Mur in 2020. More recently, during the summer 2024, his large-scale site-specific installation Horizon : 1000 blocs, 6 couleurs was presented during the Anglet Biennale, curated by Didier Arnaudet.