Philippe Decrauzat — Anisotropy — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 17 → May 15, 2011

We are pleased to be showing Anisotropy, Philippe Decrauzat’s first solo exhibition in a Paris institution.

Philippe Decrauzat was born in 1974, and lives and works in Lausanne. He is currently revisiting the arena of abstraction and, in particular, Op Art and Kineticism, in order to broaden its range and its different prospects. His approach consists in the first instance in developing an interest in a repertory of forms — minimal and geometric — and observing their differing developments, before re-appropriating them for himself.

Through the drawings, paintings, sculptures and films that he offers us, we thus find ourselves involved, willy-nilly, in hobnobbing with different sources, which nevertheless overlap with formal analogies: Tron (1982), a film made by the Disney studios, with Muybridge and his grids acting as background references for the movements recorded by the camera, or, alternatively, the two-dimensional world of Flatlands, the novel written by Edwin A. Abbott in the 19th century.

These different sources convey the challenge made by the artist to this idealistic vision that abstract art has long incarnated: an ideal space, detached from our material reality, is in contrast with the multiple experience of all fields, irrespective, in a set of figures which may captivate us by their radicalness and by the different interplays made of them. Philippe Decrauzat strives to hand us this form of experience through works and installations actively summoning us to exercise our perception.

For Le Plateau, the artist has come up with brand new works, some of which are very precisely adapted to the place’s architecture, for a circuit largely dominated by motifs of undulation and pulsation.

In a radical contrast between dark rooms and harshly lit rooms, we first discover an all-encompassing wall painting (On Cover, 2011) with amazing moiré and iridescent effects. Then comes the screening of a first film made on the basis of the titles for Fahrenheit 451 (1966) by François Truffaut, with a succession of over-colourful views of aerials on roofs, suggesting the broadcasting of waves towards somewhere else, somewhere between transmission and reception. In a third room , a large set looking like a wall tipped horizontally presents Anisotropy (2011), a strange steel sculpture with concentric parallelepiped motifs, a diverted reproduction of an object produced as part of a vast research project to do with making matter invisible.

After passing through a venue where, set face to face, we find a series of paintings with black and white stripes in alternating shades of colour (Slow Motion, 2011), the exhibition is punctuated by a second film in colour, which is especially emblematic of the artist’s approach. Made on the basis of certain excerpts from Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy, the image makes a series of coloured tokens appear and disappear, tokens which, in a pulsating manner, increase the combinations on the screen: based on this playful principle which, in more ways than one, underpins his work, Philippe Decrauzat causes us to vibrate, with these simple coloured circles, to the beat of the flashes of one of the first signs of modernity.

Exhibition’s curator: Xavier Franceschi