Métamorphose de l’ordinaire — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 8 → October 21, 2017

Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire is delighted to present “Metamorphosis of the ordinary”, a group show featuring the work of Téo Bétin, Isabelle Ferreira, Loïc Pantaly, Zhuo Qi, Alexander Raczka, Matthieu Raffard and Linda Sanchez.

Next September, seven sculptor artists will express their creativity in volume within the four walls of the gallery. They all metamorphose ordinary shapes and question the concept of skill, this virtuoso ability to design and craft. In their own way, they all try to rethink our way of life, our sciences and traditions. Scrutiny is their motto: they observe in order to transform.

“We have seen that there are analogies between mythical thought on the theoretical, and ’bricolage’ on the practical plane and that artistic creation lies mid- way between science and these two forms of activity .” Lévi-Strauss’s “bricolage” metaphor puts sculpture in between the “mythical thought” of the artist and theoretical knowledge. The exhibition tries to materially account for the possibilities of cultural arrangements and rethink the forms it takes. This revision concerns both the field of theoretical reinterpretation and that of materials revaluation.

In Le service de table chaleureux, Zhuo Qi’s uses his porcelain mastery and humor to invite us to a feast, a contemporary and teasing reinterpretation of 19th century formal tables. By staging French tradition and tableware, Zhuo Qi revisits and questions its codes all the while paying great attention to visual neatness. Here, cookies are replaced by teddy bears drowned in porcelain. Silverwares melt and spread over the enameled white of the Limoges plates.

In a balancing act between materials and forms, Matthieu Raffard’s Athanor evokes the mad yet serious quest of alchemists in the 17th century. What remedies can we expect from a fluid circulation machine? In the same way than antique cosmic ovens, the installation skillfully and poetically rekindles the spirit of bygone day experiments around purification and transformation.

Alongside Matthieu Raffard’s ovens and stills, the metamorphosis of elements also happens through Linda Sanchez’s gesture. Like a naturalist, she uses and rips the ground off its original state to turn it into a sand fabric (Tissu de sable). She creates drapery from the ground and reduces its material to a thin layer. The alchemist and the naturalist therefore turn the gallery ground floor into a new experimental laboratory.

On the first floor, Teto Bétin’s Villa I, inspired by the famous villa Tugendhat , investigates our mode of housing and its memorial dimension. While the artist’s almost livable and architectured sculpture resembles a shack, its primary intention is to be a plastic experiment of space. By embedding glass-mounted landscape photographs into the wooden structure, the artist questions the functionalist interaction between the outside and the inside.

Loic Pantaly’s Potentielles spreads over the entire length of the gallery wall and creates a succession of mechanical, and sometimes sound, effects. Here again, we are presented with an empirical “bricolage” that associates diverse components often collected on previous sculptures to give shape to a both clever and absurd machine. Symbolism and non-sense are the two elements that Loic Pantaly takes out of pataphysics, all the while giving a prominent role to organization. Through the means of engine and technology, the artist tries to turn fate into an equation he can control.

Alexander Raczka’s Armes & Outils are no tribute to men’s military violence but a praise of its clever ingenuity. The works is made of a variety of found objects: railway switch components, blades, spirals, axes and arrows are fixed at the end of fishing rods. They pop out of the wall, divide the space and refer once again to the “bricolage” metaphor. Indeed, the etymology of the word is to be found in the art of war from the Middle Age, back when it meant “catapult”. The meanings of the verb “bricoler” progressively evolved toward “trickery”, but also toward the idea of the unofficial way of doing things, before acquiring the meaning of the individual action of “making”.

As for Isabelle Ferreira, she has mastered the art of appreciating and seeing the potentiality of disregarded materials. Her gesture, which is at the chore of her practice, sheds light on their hidden value. Her Substractions are a wonderful synthesis of sculpture and painting. Her carved wood boards painted with acrylic contribute to building the language of a new materiality. Her action is extreme, yet measured and full of delicacy.

“I want sculptures that can spill over us like oil jars! I want sculptures that can spread over this wooden floor like hair cut at the hairdresser! I want sculptures as transparent as carafes!”
The seven artists featured in this exhibition answer Apollinaire’s questions from 1913 with all the creative boldness and inventiveness the poet could have hoped for. Especially because they are poets themselves.

Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire wants to address a special thanks to the artists along with Pascaline Mulliez, the Maubert Gallery, the Progress Gallery and Nadine Feront Gallery.