Daniel Dezeuze — Tableaux-valises et dessins — Templon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 9 → February 20, 2016

Can we grasp a traveller’s journey? Or a butterfly’s flight? Daniel Dezeuze summons up the shades of Euclid and Lewis Carroll in a new exhibition punctuated by topological twists, Euclidian exclamations and cases-as-paintings.

The artist creates a concertinaing of colours and objet, paintings and drawings, floor-based and wall-based works. On the other side of the looking glass, paintings are cases, sculptures are paintings and drawings fly.

The artist sees this enigmatic and playful hanging approach as a ‘work in progress within the infancy of art’. Shrugging off the weight and the rules of art, Daniel Dezeuze plays with the opposing notions of emptiness and fullness, using drawing to cultivate detachment and take a light-hearted view of the world.

A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group in the 1970s, Daniel Dezeuze has spent forty years deconstructing the traditional media and materials of painting. His early interest in nomad and non-European cultures produced a reinterpretation of American art, both abstract and minimalist, in the 1960s. His singular journey, steeped in craftwork practices and anthropology, has led him to experiment with what are seen as basic materials, wood, metal gauze, net and fabric, as well as subverted objects.

Daniel Dezeuze’s work is influencing an entire new generation of American painters and receives critical attention from across the Atlantic.

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Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in the southern French port town of Sète.

FRAC Languedoc Roussillon in Montpellier held a major exhibition of his drawings from October to December 2015. His work has recently been exhibited in the Cherry and Martin Gallery in Los Angeles and New York’s Canada Gallery (2014), MAMAC in Nice (2012), Centrale Electrique in Brussels (2009) and Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2009).