Lars Fredrikson — Anne Barrault Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: 2010-12-14 18:00:00 +0100 → 2010-12-18 19:00:00 +0100

With the release of Lars Fredrikson’s first piece of sound anthology : ”plastic sounds /frag.1” produced by Ramuntcho Matta for sometimeStudio, you are invited by Maurice Benhamou and Gallery Anne Barrault to come and discover his visual and sound work at the gallery.

This artist of the second half of the 20th century, who paints, draws, sculptures, influenced by the constructivists Kandinsky, Malevich… has worked with writers and poets such as Samuel Beckett. Wishing to overshawdow the voluminous and visual sides of things, he has very soon turned his artistic researches towards technical and immaterial aspects, experimenting sounds as sculptures, frequencies, living matters. “I am not interested in sculpture as volume. To me, classical sculpture means nothing. I wonder: is the idea of “space around something” “cosa mentale”?” ¹

For this exhibition, drawings, paintings, stainless steel pieces and a soundtrack echo and reverberate on the walls of the gallery and on the viewer/listener. This sound is the recording of a needle on a sheet of a paper, from a machine invented by the US Army in order to intercept the sounds from space. Lars Fredrikson materializes it with his sound frequencies, which, in their turn, take shape in drawings. His stainless steel works reflect and distort the world and the position of the viewer, from a formal point of view as well as from a hearing one, because of the reverberation of the surrounding sound. The perception is disturbed and puts one into a plastic and sound space of psychedelic dimensions.

Lars Fredrikson sculptures sound, and his work is to be listened to and felt. As elements of reflection, this immaterial matter is not “qualitative” but organic. The artist uses it for its plastic qualities in oder to reveal new sensations outside and inside one. Like for his exhibition in Villa Arson in Nice, in the early eighties, the sound is sometimes imperceptible in the space of the gallery. Its outlines are blurred, with more or less long silences which do not sound as such. The matter of the sound goes through the viewer, develops in his physical and mental space, and creates a sound experience rather than a musical one. “I wanted to free myself from everything. To have nothing else but sound playing on me, in me. Even if it was also delivered into space”.

¹ Maurice Benhamou : “visibility and unpredictability”, l’Harmattan, Paris, 2006