Le ciel bientôt sera trop court — Martine Aboucaya Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 27 → December 22, 2012

Soon the sky will be too short gathers various artists whose works question, challenge and decompose image and language. Through mixtures, assemblies and collages, juxtapositions and overlays, the pieces on display propose to wander through imagination, to remember past and forthcoming times. In a subtle inconsistancy, they stand for a poetic of absurd and nonsense, catching words, moments and images and composing a sharp score through a vague temporality. Soon the sky will be too short, a time for a different thought on what surrounds us, for something of a new perception of our world that lead to a new learning of our stories.

Each one of Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain’s four prints overlays an extract in roman type of a text about the Sun and an extract in italic type of a text about the Moon. Continuing the work started with their previous solo show, Two Voices, these pieces transpose the moments the Sun and the Moon are in the sky, each day of 2012, into a literary dimension. These two semi-opaque texts thus print on a fragile japanese paper the memory of four past days of the year, a trace of the meeting between the Sun and the Moon, between a writer and another.

With The Children, Peter Friedl produces a tableau vivant based on Fëmijët, a 1966 socialist-realist painting by the Albanian artist Spiro Kristo depicting seven children in the street, among whom five are looking down at a chalk drawing on a rifle, while two already have a rifle hanging over their shoulder. From the worrying atmosphere and ideology of the original painting, Peter Friedl recreates the composition process, transposing the street scene in a looted room of a fascist-style decorated Tirana hotel. When one of the girl suddenly pronounce in albanian the only words of the video, « The image should stand out of the frame », she reveals the disintegration of the social-realist painter’s aesthetics by the slow and poetic reconstruction of the image’s real message, shot by shot, part by part.

The letters randomly gathered in a limited space in Nina Papaconstantinou’s Landru give an image to language and its raw material. Landru evokes the early XXth century criminal’s solitary confinment, both physical and moral, prisonner of langage which caused his ruin. Deconstructed to the sign, Nina Papaconstantinou’s language condenses and expands itself, catching on the wall Landru’s growing accumulation of thoughts and inability to communicate.

With Mémoire, Eric Duyckaerts produces another pastiche of the teacher’s authority, insisting on its ill-timed use of ancient greek to support his argument, on his connivances and sophisms. His recorded improvisation gradually moves from some experts’ serious theories to a meaningless and implausible logic, full of doubtful etymologies and unseemly examples. From anamnesis to the Apsylia sea-slug, from Aristote to the « memory of future », Eric Duyckaerts opens education to a humorous and poetic dimension.

Douglas Gordon’s video shifts the sentence A Moment’s Silence (For Someone Close To You) from a black type on a white background to a white type on a black background. The time for contemplation and memory, the one marked by this slow transition, thus enlarges the field of memory to those who are still close to us.

And each night at 7pm, Dan Graham’s historic film Rock My Religion will be projected in the gallery space. This complex collage of text extracts, quotations, film footage and live performance recordings reveals a stricking association between the Shakers’ Circle Dance and punk pogos, feminist messianism and the rock stars’ canonization, the devotee and fan, the zeal of christian assemblies and the one of concert halls.