The Promise — Crèvecoeur Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 16 → April 30, 2011

The Promise is an exhibition of young European and American artists, presenting work that deals with the reappropriation of objects. Whether expressed aesthetically, historically or personally, the act of creating reality is represented here as existing between fascination with and detachment from form and influence. The gap linking these two approaches appears precisely as the moment when everything is possible, when one can infinitely remake: this is the space of the promise.

Some artists in the exhibition use archival material to accomplish this, such as Agnieszka Polska, whose animations are visual collages made of photographs found in art magazines and newspapers from the 1960s, giving her videos a documentary aspect. My Favorite Things desecrates art history’s iconic forms through considering them as everyday objects.

Others re-aestheticize the object in its pure form, providing it with a cult dimension. This is the case in the work of Susanne M. Winterling whose 16 mm film Untitled (cupstairspearls) is a short loop of baroque and bourgeois inspiration. Combining a disturbing humor and a low-tech and pop sensibility, Shana Moulton has produced a series of videos and performances including The Galactic Pot Healer, which deal with hypochondria, American mass consumption and Californian psychedelia. Evoking minimal sculpture and Stone Age monoliths, Erin Shirreff’s series Signatures strike us with their austerity and angular lines. This photographic mise en abyme brings to the photographed object a mythical aspect and a reappropriation on a pedestal.

Some, finally, bring up to date objects-images and objects-influences. Inspired by geometric abstraction and optical art, David Malek’s canvas reveals in depth research on color space in painting, while reusing an imagery taken from science fiction. Florian and Michaël Quistrebert have transformed one of the gallery walls into a black and white tapestry of optical illusion, borrowed from Lingelbach’s scintillating grid. Displayed as a background for the other pieces of the show, it appears as the artists’ will to captivate the viewer through hypnosis, as much as to mock the notion of white cube, the object containing and the object contained.