Ryan Gander — Make every show like it’s your last — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 19 → November 17, 2013

Ryan Gander, Make Every Show Like It’s your Last — Le Plateau La générosité et la prolixité de Ryan Gander ne manquent pas d’intriguer ; présentée jusqu’au 17 novembre 2013, cette première exposition personnelle de l’artiste dans une institution parisienne tient ses promesses et offre une plongée dans un univers à part.

Seize A l'honneur cette quinzaine deux expositions personnelles audacieuses d'artistes singuliers dont les univers, pour différents qu'ils soient, partagent une même implication. Michel Aubry d'abord au Crédac, qui revient avec nous sur sa démarche au long d'un grand entretien, et Ryan Gander au Plateau, des personnalités foudroyantes qui créent un écho subtil en cette rentrée 2013

The Frac Île-de-France — Le Plateau is presenting Make every show like it’s your last, the British artist Ryan Gander’s first solo exhibition in a Paris institution. Making the most of an extremely effusive imagination, the artist does his utmost to offer us works which tend to re-visit the conceptual art arena, not without wit.

Proposing wind at the Kassel Documenta, producing a remake of one of the key scenes in Julian Schnabel’s biopic about Jean-Michel Basquiat, presenting sealed boxes whose contents are seemingly described by texts on the wall, associating images, captions and comments in a discursive style, art — and in particular that art whose favorite subject is art itself — is, for him, a huge playground where the right thing to do is to redefine constantly the rules in order to play new games.

Ryan Gander, Poster realisé en soutien à la campagne Artists for the NHS. Une campagne menée par des artistes pour protester contre le projet de privatisation d’une grande partie du service d’assurance sociale au Royaume-Uni © Ryan Gander, Courtesy de l’artiste

In this context, the basic author/work/viewer triptych does indeed represent the point of departure of works aiming precisely, in this reflexive manner, at experiencing all its motives.

As an author, Ryan Gander regularly appears in his works. When self-portraits are not involved — proposed without the slightest complacency, and very often borrowings of self-mockery — he gives us a raft of biographical data like so many elements informing what is being presented to us. But over and above this autobiographical form, which does not shrink from tipping over into a certain romanticism, it is above all to his thought processes that he invites us.

Seance de prises de vues realisee pour l’œuvre Lost in my own recursive narrative (The Russian Club, Londres, janvier 2012) © Ryan Gander, Courtesy de l’artiste Image John Newton

With Ryan Gander, the work usually appears like a form of enigma to be solved. However, far from a simple solution to be found, it is indeed the status of the work, its role, which it is a matter of revisiting : as it happens, the real “exhibits” proposed to us by the artist are to be seen as such, but aslso as the vehicles of a narrative, as the agents — confused and active at once — of a way of thinking that is deliberately on the move.

As for the viewer, we might say, unafraid, that he is the essential factor in the arrangement. Everything is addressed to him, and it is through his presence that the whole approach is justified. Everything is done for his perception to be called upon, his attention attracted, and his intelligence stimulated.

Ryan Gander, Please be patient Série de peintures réalisées par Ryan Gander, de portraits d’individus qu’il a rencontré, peints de mémoire. L’œuvre se présente sous la forme d’un disque de verre accroché au mur. Le disque a été utilisé comme palette pour mélanger les couleurs utilisées

At Le Plateau, among the very latest works produced which will each tend to be incorporated in these three perspectives — makeshift shelters made by the artist’s child that have become marble sculptures, a parallelepiped in darkness with an undefined function, a pair of eyes in the wall reacting to the visitor’s slightest movement — there is one that clearly responds to this latter objective : a so-called advertising campaign organized by the British Ministry of Health aimed at encouraging imagination among the populace.