Peter Soriano — Projets récents — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 26 → July 13, 2018

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to present a new exhibition by Peter Soriano. The exhibition centres on two recent projects: one, titled Cresta, initially exhibted at Circuit, the contemporary art centre in Lausanne, in September 2017; and the other to be exhibited as part of L’Art dans les chapelles in Brittany in July 2018. Soriano’s exhibition at Fournier combines segment of his wall drawings from both projects along with related works on paper.

Peter Soriano, IAGDV, 2018 Pencil and watercolor on paper — 79 × 92 cm © Alberto Ricci, Courtesy Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris

The role of memory is at the core of Peter Soriano’s work. In the course of his travels, and each time he is invited to create a wall drawing, he allows his surroundings to guide him or his work according to a fixed protocol. He begins by visiting the site, where he takes measurements and sketches details to help find his bearings. Then, in the studio, he makes drawings on sheets of Japanese paper, working both from careful notes and on-site observations as well as from memory, which then serve as a basis for his large wall murals.

Peter Soriano, Cresta #11, 2017 Pencil, watercolor and ink on paper — 57 × 65 cm © Alberto Ricci, Courtesy Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris

Peter Soriano’s main source of inspiration is landscape and spaces through which he travels (views from a moving trains or his studio windows, for instance, or architectural structures …). The two projects presented in this exhibition evoke two different notions of landscape. For Cresta, Soriano expresses the concept of landscape and immensity using as his starting point a quotidian object, a small aluminum chocolate wrapper, while for L’Art dans les chapelles his project is conceived around the very chapel he has devoted himself to.

The Cresta project sprang from an urge to convey landscape differently. How to communicate the idea of immensity by way of an miniscule and easily manipulated object? Soriano’s distortion of a confectionary wrapper resituates our imagination. The various Cresta drawings attest to the intense deliberations that led to the enormous wall drawings in Lausanne, a sample of which is being presented at Galerie Fournier. Here we readily recognise Soriano’s familiar geometrical vocabulary and his way it modulates with different media.

For the drawings that will accompany his mural in the Chapelle Saint-Jean in Le Sourn in July, Soriano considers the idea of displacement in space, both his own as he moves through the chapel as well as the projection of a fellow visitor’s movements. A detail caught his attention: the layout of the granite flagstones that divide the space and create a path to the altar. With this project, Peter Soriano crosses a new threshold, towards more formal freedom in drawings; more painterly and colourful. He distances himself from diagrammatic markings and mathematical abstraction to engage with the realm of the imaginary. The rectangular shapes are seen simultaneously as opaque, dense blocks and also, by pure mental projection, as an alignment of translucent stained glass windows with shifting, shimmering colours.

> The exhibition will be accompanied by a monograph of Peter Soriano’s works on paper 2009–2018 (Pub. Galerie Jean Fournier).

> To mark Paris Gallery Weekend, Polar System will perform at the gallery on Sunday 27 May at 4pm.

> Peter Soriano’s wall drawings for L’Art dans les chapelles wil be on view at Chapelle Saint-Jean in Le Sourn from 6 July to 16 September 2018.