Noir — Clair — GVQ – Vanessa Quang — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 8 → November 10, 2012

Light — Black is a passage. Black towards reparation, travelling via doubt. A creative process: that of drawing. Black pencil.

Black is the concentration of all colours

Mourning but also elegance, Goya and Chapman but also the irony and elegance of drawing, it immerses us in life. The black of suffering makes us sense a constant ambivalence: between black and life, between life and black, life as blackness, like a stopover in the desert. Illness, danger, death.

The self-portraits in pencil or pen by Bob Flanagan, an SM artist, moments of suffering and pleasure conjoined; medieval monsters attacking the black castles of Friuli in works by Tonino Cragnolini; the broken faces in the recent prints by Mat Collishaw and his drawings of his malformations; the chaotic world of Lucien Murat. And, outside the gallery, by way of a welcome, a declaration of war by Luc Mattenberger, an inaugural Molotov cocktail. “I am afraid, I want to be fear” — so draws Eric Pougeau.

Life is also grey

It is hesitation. Life is always looking for another life, a fresh start, a way of getting out from inside the needle, of finding a horseman (Joseph Brodsky). Black life encounters doubt at every crossroads. Rather than paralyse, doubt, that essential questioning, whether scientific or existential, liberates energy, initiates movement, gives us a glimpse of possible realities we have yet to explore. Consciousness arises from hesitation. The drawings in the form of questions by Julien Serve, the words by Robert Montgomery, the polymorphous realities of the self in the world as seen by Martin Lord, the wandering and journeying of duality with Charley Case, the strange creatures of Jeanine Woolard, the children (or teenagers, already?) by Françoise Petrovitch, leave us adrift in this doubt which still does not know which way to lean.

Some awareness leads us to the process

The process of mourning, creative process, a process of reparation, too. A process whose model is mathematical and musical as well: repetitive drawing, endless lines and strokes, circles that never close, writing, the synthesizing formula, staves, notes, words. The FAXes by Rudy Shepherd & Frank Olive will arrive in the gallery in a quotidian process reminding us of the passing of days.

The poetic equations of Jean-Michel Pancin bring us closer to the “one we dream of.” The drawings by Mounir Fatmi, references to The Angel’s Black Leg, suggest the possibility of a healing process through grafting while those by Andrea Mastrovito, processes at once abstract and formal, serenade us with their music, loud and low and again. Fabrice Langlade compulsively wields his ballpoints, scribbling and scrawling airplanes that carry away our anxieties.

Light — Black will also evoke the links between patients (living in blackness) and therapists (who trigger processes) and will unhesitatingly enter its protagonists’ more personal spheres, their existential self-doubt — hence the presence of tokens from time past, markers that trouble more than they guide, showing a life path taken between blackness and colour, from Toulouse-Lautrec to Cocteau.

The three parts of Light — Black will be presented in parallel, causing viewers to oscillate between blackness, doubt and process, impelling imbalance.

These three parts will be more extensively explored in talks given by three experts on art in all its forms, including the composer Philippe Hurel, for whom virtual, musical, abstract processes are a passion, and Régis Durand, who will elect, in this exhibition of works on paper, a few photographic images and a profound reflexion upon the grey and the black, inspired by Endgame by Beckett as well as by life itself, with no end.