Les filtres harmoniques (harmonic filters) — Art : Concept Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 1, 2012 → January 5, 2013

“We’re all electrical generators. it’s thank to electro chemistry that we’re able to think”.

Andrew Lewis

Networks stimulate Andrew Lewis in all their aspects; be they electric, sociologic or genetic. Their inter-alliance has triggered off a new series of paintings, which will be shown on occasion of his third personal exhibition at Art:Concept. Andrew Lewis, an architect by training, is an enigmatic and surprising person who hardly ever separates from a heavy back pack which, Hans Ulrich Obrist underlined during an interview with the artist as a “real portable workshop”. He develops a hybrid and poetic architectural form of art, halfway between reality and science fiction. He focuses on social and technological evolutions but also on the evolution of time as fully-fledged element. An element that turns into a common thread linking artistic narrative works and epochs to each other; while at the same time warning that this connection will inevitably cause some sort of time-compression. epochs interpenetrate, the advent of technical evolutions meeting each other and fostering progress make way for a universe perceived as a harmonious yet manifold space.

This exhibition is built on allegories of new relations built between Time and History. Andrew Lewis conjugates history with evolution along parallel lines. For instance the painting called With Elizabeth Wydeville shows us a young woman, representing a descendant of the first commoner ever who have married an English monarch (Edward IV of the House of York), comfortably installed inside a bucolic landscape. From her new Arcadia, the young woman observes a kind of anachronic if not strange sculpture with a little window in it. The anecdote does not stop at the mere parallel between the moral evolution of monarchy and evolving social mores, partly fostered by technology, it is also intended as an exploration of history with the purpose of showing a universal evolution while at the same time insisting on the invariable quality of certain virtues and episodes of history.

In his softly naïf, sometimes even slightly mannerist paintings, Andrew Lewis develops the idea of interaction between characters both human or sculpted and their immediate environment, which tends to create a group dynamic. His works show all the innovation and ingenuity that we’ve had to use to develop within the bosom of society which in turn has begun to function like an organism abolishing its own privileges, thus breaking the codes
that it had eagerly created not so long before.

Andrew Lewis attends to make an original synthesis between the painterly transposition of calm and hieratic characters and time in its most fleeing, mobile and evolving aspects. His figures evoke Robert Musil’s ones. They are men and woman without evident “qualities” who, once freed of the sediments of their own milieu and epoch, become extremely sensitive to all experiments and act as a sort of trans-historic multiple conscience.

Floating in the gallery’s space, these paintings, or harmonic filters, turn into as many “vessels of tought”, as Andrew Lewis explains; they distill thought and reflection, they compress time. These harmonic filters are, as it were, tabernacles of history that becomes the container of continuity, adaptation and connection.