Traits d’un abri — Esben Klemann, Martinet & Texereau, Shoi — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 19 → May 21, 2016

Shelters for the soul, the body and the imaginary…This exhibition falls within the gallery’s long-standing love for contemporary drawing. Three “worlds” are on display : the scrutiny of a spatial reality by Martinet&Texereau, the never-ending improvisations of Esben Klemann as well as the touching and grotesque secret world of Shoi.

Martinet&Texereau

French artist tandem Martinet&Texereau, author of four-handed drawings, goes against the traditional vision of art as the expression of the artist’s personality : here one plus one equals three, for the end goal is not to add up two individual styles but to create a third one. The focus of the work is daily life, which our jaded gaze takes in so little, if at all, and in particular the daily life of housing and its shared areas. In their most recent drawings Martinet&Texereau make an inventory of the volumes and nooks of buildings with their entry halls, tiling, skirting boards, and closed doors, where time appears to have stopped. Even the plants in their automatic sprinkling pots and well-groomed exterior small gardens seem to exude lifelessness despite the growing vegetation. All is clean and contained. The pencil strokes act like a scalpel feeling tissue, learning its surface before breaking into it… Each detail (joints, veins, textures) is rendered with a fascinating combination of surgical detachment and sensuality. The framing is tight and the focus perfect, like that of a microscope examining a specimen. The universe conveyed by Martinet&Texereau is evocative of New Objectivity, without the biting humor. There seems to be a touch of surrealism in these works ; humanity may be invisible but it is not absent.

Zoé Texereau (born in 1986) and Pauline Martinet (born in 1987) have been creating together since 2008. Their collaboration was born from a desire to step out of the solitude of the illustrator and to desacralize the bond between the artist and art. Both 2010 ENSAD graduates, Martinet&Texereau have already taken part in fifteen shows, including five solo shows (Le fond des choses, 2011 — Tropiques, 2012 — Héliotropisme et Midnattssol, 2014 — Lieux Communs, 2015). The tandem has also authored two artists’ books and a retrospective catalogue of their entire work. In 2014 they were chosen for an artist’s residency at LKV (Trondheim, Norway). Their work has been exhibited in the salons Drawing Now (Paris, 2013-2014) and Drawing Room (Castres, 2011) and they were awarded the Charles Oulmont Foundation Prize in 2015. Outlining a shelter is the first exhibition of Martinet&Texereau’s work at the Galerie Maria Lund.

———

Esben Klemann

I do things that seem impossible at first…because it’s ALWAYS interesting ! My accumulated experience throws ideas into the void and challenges me to give them material life. Thus speaks Esben Klemann, a Danish multi-artist who approaches all media with a playful attitude, constantly attempting to subjugate all materials, following the rule of “systematic uncertainty”. The exhibition will show works that evolve around imaginary architectures in metamorphosis: the video Sketch 2016, an ensemble of drawings in pen and in stoneware, one of his favored mediums. Esben Klemann’s work functions according to a logic of ideas and form associations: Lines and structures undulate, come up, come down, wind, densify, slide and throw themselves in the void, erasing themselves in order to go back immediately. All is potentially in mutation in a movement where the unpredictable becomes an important element. His interventions and sculptures in concrete space graft themselves,parasite-like, and inspire themselves of what is given to take it elsewhere… In that manner, Esben Klemann is really from his time, where the desire to master and pursue an idea have given way to the quest of the unknown, even a form of bowing down to the forces that escape us. Observation then allows to better seize them until they escape again… Esben Klemann’s constructions are contemporary, poetic and amusing follies, snapshots of an omnipotent freedom.

Esben Klemann, Sketch 4, 2016 Pen on paper — 27,4 × 35,7cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maria Lund, Paris

Esben Klemann (born in 1972) has studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark, before having a number of exhibitions throughout the country, in institutions, (Charlottenborg, Bornholms Kunstmuseum, Vejen Kunstmuseum, Danmarks Keramikmuseum Copenhagen Ceramics, etc.),galleries and in the public space. He was notably invited, in 2013, by the town of Vejen, to install 14 sculptures in concrete in the public space (project EGNSBETON). The Galerie Maria Lund exhibited him for the first time during Summer 2013 in the context of Terres- Copenhagen Ceramics Invites( Nouvelles vague — Palais de Tokyo-CPGA).

The following year he exhibited an ensemble of sculptures and video for Chaotiquement votre. Recently, the gallery showed his work at ART15 (London) and Le Parcours Carougeois (Switzerland) welcomed a selection of his sculptures for its 2015 edition. Esben Klemann’s work is featured in many notable collections in Denmark, among which the National fund for art; this year he is making three commissions for the public space.

———

Shoi

Since the creation of her drawing series “être” (being) (2011), a small armless legless voluptuous but headless woman has appeared in the universe of Shoi, a Korean performer and artist. These scenes drawn in pencil which are Dionysian, crude, funny and tender reveal an intimate world rendered with a mix of naturalist precision and simple contouring. The human being is closely linked to nature to the extent of finding its prolongation in hybrid anthropomorphisms and woman-animal or woman-vegetal-mineral accumulations. Corals, sea anemone, jelly fish, fish or turtles inhabit this submarine world where the armless and legless woman takes light steps, moves by turtle back or becomes an integral part of these “tiered pieces” that recall both the universes of Bernard Palissy and Hieronymus Bosch. Contrary to the legless and armless woman who has no head, the animals do have theirs. .. As a sexual voluptuous being, the headless and legless woman breathes, gives herself or bows to nature and gets carried away in the currents and growths that form her shelter. Her absorption can be so total that only the tip of a breast is visible…. In one drawing a big solitary gleaming jellyfish slithers gracefully in the semi-obscurity — probably the image of a libertarian and liberating journey… Sub-marine here meaning sub-conscious.

Panorama of a personal mythology, whichever the medium, Shoi’s works allow to live again, exorcize and surpass, go beyond one’s past a past or a difficulty — in the spirit of a shamanic ritual.

Shoi, Etre part 2 en dessous (4), 2016 Pencil on paper — 13,4 × 21cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maria Lund, Paris

Shoi (born in 1983) is a graduate from the ENSBA, Paris, where she studied under Giuseppe Penone and Jean-Luc Vilmouth (2007-2010). As early as 2007, she participated in collective projects such as Collection printemps/été 2008 at the cultural space of the EDF Foundation and Projet Cafétéria with Tadashi Kawamata. In 2012, the Galerie Maria Lund hosted her performance Mes souffles in the context of the Nocturne de la FIAC as well as an ensemble of drawings in the exhibition 12 × 12. This collaboration continued in 2014 with the presentation of her first ceramics sculptures (Intériorité — 3 days in Paris).