C.h.a.i.s.e.s — New to the Wall Foundation, Paris pop-up — Point de vue — Slash Paris

C.H.A.I.S.E.S. — La géométrie sociale du jardin du Luxembourg @ New to the Wall Foundation - Espace de projet from October 20 to 22. Learn more Drawing on the observations and intuitions of the project’s initiator, Jimmy Gardner, four main movements emerge from the everyday practices of the Luxembourg’s regular visitors. Materialised through minimalist sculptures, yet subtly echoing the botanical richness inseparable from these very chairs, these four movements function as scripts that give rhythm to this presentation, in which each artist has taken up the challenge of reinventing a centuries-old practice, putting their work at the service of this bubbling reflection that questions even our relationship with public space and society. From figuration to transfiguration, the artists share a sense of complicity that can be felt throughout the exhibition’s progression. Sensitivity, meanwhile, returns as a recurring thread, contributing to this shared desire to bring to life what emanates from these chairs.

Warmth first emerges in the drawings (and the poetic mechanical inventions that accompany them) of Quinn Lewis, who, playing with the reflections and vibrations of the line, imbues his figurative work with an almost epidermal suppleness. In the hypersensitivity of Jessica Anne Schwartz’s drawings, it is the poetic force of the object, and its ability to present itself to perception in the form of images, that comes to the fore. She thus recomposes the movements and sounds of moments spent in the Garden into poetic scores, through drawings of exceptional delicacy, whose taut compositions manage to convey the extraordinary balance between strength and lightness. Dadaist and devilishly effective, Wayne Pate’s drawings orchestrate a procession of chairs that may be anthropomorphic or anthropophagous, swooping down upon the beings who have used them and imprinting themselves forever in their memories. Who, indeed, could forget the experience of reading, talking or meeting someone in the Jardin du Luxembourg, seated on one of these chairs?

Rather than oblivion, it is absence that comes fully into play in Charlotte Tampol’s paintings and her staging of an unremarkable disappearance: that of an embracing couple who, in a companion painting, have left behind a bag of groceries. Beyond the artist’s technical mastery of light, the paintings overturn the relationship between subject and object, transforming the chairs from witnesses to the main story into guardians of the thousands of others unfolding there every day. And perhaps they have much to say; a hypothesis that Allard van Hoorn takes seriously in his installation. Here, one of these famous suspended chairs transmits its vibrations through an ingenious amplification system, setting its magnetic song in motion. Beside it, a roll of drawings borrows signs and symbols from philosophy, literature and poetry, giving them a mythology.

A form of life for him, resonating with all the other works on display; while the poetics of their movement undoubtedly have much to tell us, what is most urgent is that we preserve, by listening to them, these movements, these moments of freedom, invention and reverie that connect us to nothing other than one another, here and now.