Grey Matter — Galerie Laurent Mueller — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 4 → 26, 2014

“With poetry, the imagination places itself in the margin where, precisely, the function of the unreal comes to seduce or worry — always awakening the being asleep in his automatisms.”

Gaston Bachelard

In Sebastian Gögel’s and Laurence De Leersnyder’s work, matter primes upon form. As these artists explore it, matter appears to be a memory that refreshes itself following its moods. It is surface where gesture becomes inscribed, residual trace of a past phenomenon, manifestation of a symptom. It contains this evident mystery of shape in the making, like the diffuse anxiety of something that has not been entirely spoken. The Germans speak of Stimmung to describe this sens similar to connotation, at the fringe of enunciation.

This expression belongs to a family of counter-forms: empty shapes, everted like a glove, or now tangible by the intermediary of a mould or an imprint. The counter-form calls for another, an outside. Hence we often ask ourselves about the condition that led to the emergence of these works, the reason that gave them life. These shapes have an even more pronounced mysterious and paradoxal character as they are not phantomatic at all but seam, on the contrary, to have grown from their own and for themselves without any intervening hand. This is why the grotesque invites itself that often into the matter-related pirouettes of both artists, like an inverted expression of heroism. To try and “grasp” these forms, one is never far from disconcert or laughter (which sometimes can be the same) whilst facing the failure of sense.