La Promenade — Galerie G-P & N Vallois — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 2, 2020 → January 30, 2021

«La Promenade», a story written by Robert Walser in 1917, takes us on a day of strolling that turns everyday life into a real adventure. Learn how to look again, focus on the useless, escape from an impoverishing rationality, and realise that the journey is as important as the destination. These are the subjects of this exhibition. This exhibition aims to propose a different approach to this world whose evolution, presented as inevitable, places us in a logic dictated by the sole concern of efficiency. The exhibition proposes a selection of artists whose works or behaviours evoke an alternative apprehension of time, of the importance of digression and of the way we look at our daily lives.

Richard Baquié creates a fictitious landscape composed of photographed elements reassembled to form a non-existent whole that he calls Intégrale. In 1992, Gilles Barbier began his journey through the words by copying the dictionary. Meanwhile, Julien Beneyton is part of a workshop practice linked to his wanderings in urban and rural spaces. To another extent, Julien Berthier apprehends our city and its insignificant details bearing social or architectural anomalies.

Other details have fascinated Brassaï — another actor of the gaze — since the early 1930s. Details like graffiti, drawings and signs drawn or scratched on the walls of Paris. Alain Bublex also intervenes in the landscape. He is part of an artistic tradition as an actor of the transformation of the world opposed to an objective gaze. Sophie Calle, twenty years after her first spinning, sees her art merchant hire a detective to follow her in Paris.

Warned, the artist takes him on a stroll, which leads them to significant places in her life. During expeditions across the United States
from the end of the 1960s, Bob Cottingham photographed in an almost obsessive manner certain details of daily life, which he magnified in a virtuoso performance on canvas. Similarly, the young Cuban artist Diana Fonseca surveys the urban landscapes of
Havana, collecting paint scales from decrepit walls to make the palette of her pictorial work. Pierre Seinturier, who likes to rediscover nature through his readings and film sessions, proposes a journey from his studio through time and space. Augustas Serapinas creates a series of works that reanimate the disappeared Vienkiemis: agricultural sheds from the 1920s, most of which have fallen into disuse.

A world to explore that one guesses or imagines behind the windows with frosted glass recalling the winters of his native Lithuania. As a professional stroller, Jacques Villeglé perpetuates the laceration that has become the creation of the anonymous of the street. He was one of the first promoters of urban randomness, truly putting into practice the official definition of the New Realists’ movement. William Wegman, for his part, buys old postcards during his walks in New York around which he paints landscapes on canvas.

Virginie Yassef, who was in residence at the time, filmed randomly as she wandered around New York, and managed to create a tension linked to a succession of daily gestures that had become anonymous exploits.

Finally, Janna Zhiri’s installation «Christmas» is a distant echo of Walser’s last ballad — on December 25, 1956, where life eventually joined the work and the life of the eternal author-walker.

With : Richard Baquié, Gilles Barbier, Julien Beneyton, Julien Berthier, Brassaï, Alain Bublex, Sophie Calle, Robert Cottingham, Diana Fonseca, Pierre Seinturier, Augustas Serapinas, Jacques Villeglé, William Wegman, Virginie Yassef, Janna Zhiri.