Les Modules / Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent — Mirka Lugosi & Théodore Fivel — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 9 → October 2, 2011

In September, the Palais de Tokyo invites Yann Chevallier, the head of the artistic project and exhibitions organizer at the Confort Moderne in Poitiers, to program the Modules Fondation Pierre Bergé — Yves Saint Laurent.

Under the generic title OFF MODERN, the Confort Moderne extramural projects promote the presentation of artists close to the Poitou art center. The choice naturally fell on two French artists marginal to the institutional art scene: Mirka Lugosi and Théodore Fivel. At first sight the two artists may seem very remote from one another in the forms they use, their aesthetics, and the universes they deploy. However, they do have one thing in common: being self-taught, their artistic practices very much overspill the field staked out by contemporary art to turn up in the worlds of fashion, eroticism, music or performance.

The two Modules Fondation Pierre Bergé — Yves Saint Laurent are undertaken as a single exhibition, with a transformation of the spaces and a constricted perception of the works. The two ambiguous landscapes that constitute the exhibition offer sinuous, deviant projection locations redolent with an atmosphere of oldfashioned science fiction: an opportunity to appreciate two independent trajectories, marginal universes, outside the dominant aesthetic approaches.

Théodore Fivel

Théodore Fivel is a whimsical, multi-faceted artist. Self-taught, he grew up in the alternative Paris of the late 1980s and 1990s: a well-placed protagonist in all the new trends and urban artistic practices, from electronic music to performance, from video to fashion.

In a parallel development, he put on ever more performances, alone or at the whim of meetings between New York and Paris. Théodore Fivel has always created objects, practiced painting, installation, assemblage, music, film — the image in all its forms. His often ephemeral or “performed” work appears in a variety of contexts, with no concern about whether it is inscribed in the field of art or its recognized locations.

For his exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Théodore Fivel is offering a new piece in his series of sand pictures. The sand is placed on a slightly raised platform then painted with spray cans. A landscape of dunes with unreal colors thus literally floats in space. The hard- to-identify material that results from the painted sand seems to come from an as yet unknown planet. Only a loop-hole has been fitted into the exhibition space, making it impossible to touch the piece, and predetermining our point of view. A distanced projection, sinuous and deviant, imparts an atmosphere of old-fashioned science fiction to the work.

Mirka Lugosi

Mirka Lugosi is in many ways an exceptional person, she has led several lives. She was born a few leagues from Dracula’s castle, in the heart of the northern Carpathian Mountains, and grew up in this hallucinatory setting, which today contributes to the charm and strangeness of her universe.

An underground activist in the 1980s, she was an essential figure in the fetish scene, and a member of the experimental noise group, the Syndicate. She has published work in many magazines including Maniac with the photographer Gilles Berquet: she is Berquet’s model, muse and partner in life. Even though she likes to describe herself as a “painter of pictures” and practices gouache, inks on photographs, videograms and illustration, it is through drawing that Mirka Lugosi best expresses the complexity and subtlety of her oeuvre. Her maniacal line in ultra-fine graphite requires hours of work, painful toil, a physical ordeal that implies a certain masochism. Mirka Lugosi draws us into a world of objects, human beings and animals that merge, handled on an equal footing; a world that appears naive, yet transcends the erotic imagery to subtly and impertinently question our dreams, our impulses and our fantasies.

The artist’s work is often confined to the erotic register and the conventions of that genre, but fits into a broader line of descent from the art of the 20th century (running from Hans Bellmer to Man Ray or Unica Zurn).

The exhibition at Palais de Tokyo concentrates on the presentation of a groundbreaking drawing. For that purpose the space is transformed into a dark corridor made from thick fabric partitions leading us to the work. In this dark, disturbing landscape it is neither a heroine nor animals that are drawn in graphite. The characters and the erotic charge of the artist’s work seem to have taken possession of nature itself. An attempt to project a generic woman, fanciful self-portraits or a gendered vision of an object of desire?