Vanishing Point / Vantage Point — Dohyang Lee Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 2 → May 14, 2011

Vanishing Point, Vantage Point brings together Elena Damiani and Magali Lefebvre around considerations of points-of-view and vanishing points, both necessary for the creation of a view in perspective. The two artists enter into a dialogue with architecture and question the manner of representation obtained through the conical projection of an object, which results in an analysis of the image that approaches our visual perception.

In the work of Elena Damiani, architecture is a technique for representing different conceptions of landscape. The Palimpsests 1 & 2 series — in which the definition itself integrates the idea of reincorporation into the same medium — delivers an overview of narratives by completely abstracting them from their spatial and temporal indices. The urban landscape oscillates between representation of the ephemeral and the inescapable traces of the past. This architecture, where ruin predominates, plays on an ambiguity of scale and on a strong connotative dimension, to offer a construction that is as retrospective as it is forward-looking. It’s in these disturbed and desolated territories, where each element loses its geographical location, that Elena Damiani records a personal archive of a manufactured time. To create her collages she has, over the years, collected old architecture manuals. In Untitled (Ronchamp), we find this ancestry with a reference to Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp Chapel, finished in 1955. The original plans show an entirely curved construction, the harmonious forms employed by the architect making direct reference to the surrounding hills. In Untitled (Ronchamp), which uses some of the openings on the external façade, Elena Damiani pays tribute to this collusion between natural and artificial constructions.

Before turning to installation and sculpture, Magali Lefebvre practiced photography. It’s natural, therefore, that her work integrates the notion of perspective. For the exhibition Vanishing Point, Vantage Point, the artist brings together all of her pieces from the Playtime Without a Perspectograph project produced during her residency at Wiels in Brussels, in 2010. It is a project built around seven pieces, developing the progress from plan to form, from image to volume. This body of work contains willfully abstract constructions, joined to the ground by thin wooden poles. The motifs of anthropomorphic appearance thus seem suspended, and real landmarks are intentionally blurred by the flattening of lines and the configuration of points. These minimalist modules of inspiration create an anonymous architecture, a modeling of the real. Through the apparition of these forms, Magali Lefebvre invites us to produce movement in a static image, to experience a new cognitive dimension.