ARTPARIS+GUESTS a contemporary art fair with the participation of 114 galleries and seven platforms for emerging art. The aim is to be communal and integrate international galleries into le French scene. Whether the fair is off the ground enough to bring in a really global scope is debatable, because according to the statistics, 77 French galleries overwhelm the representation (plus a smattering of Scandinavian and European countries represented, and a lone US gallery). Nonetheless, the concept is a good one, in that expansive I’ll-bring-someone-new-to-the-dinner-party type of way. Here’s a round-up of some favorites.
Gallery: Pascal Vanhoecke at Marc Dorcel Productions
Part of a broader if-this-was-not-at-the-Grand-Palais-this-would-be-a-straight-up-porn-closet platform, France Cadet’s “Boites à mmh…” consisted of walkie talkie looking cylinders with kinky drawings that make moaning, exclaiming, panting, or breathy noises (video above). If not great art, they’re just the handy size to prank someone. Or make people very uncomfortable in the metro. Awwwww yesssssss.
Ryu Itadani’s cartoonish sketches of pop culture products, mostly recognizable drinks and condiments like Sprite and Kikkoman soy sauce, were disarmingly sweet renderings of the staples that mark our lunch breaks and the inescapable branding that makes its way into our meals.
Ryu ITADANI “Kikkoman”, Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 27.3cm x 27.3cm, 2008
Part of the Utopia/Dystopia platform, Yona Friedman and Jean-Baptiste Decavèle used black and white photographs of scenic craggy cliffs and calm waters and thensuperimposed them with maps, and doodled creatures who rise from the landscape and cavort. Could be the blueprint for a cool sci-fi movie.
Yona FRIEDMAN & Jean-Baptiste DECAVÈLE “Balkis Island”, 1 of 49 photographs, 23 x 32 cm, 2009
Gallery: Kalhama & Pippo Contemporary
Why, what have we here, it’s a “Sorry Luv” light sculpture by Liisa Lounila. Twinkling lights flicker on and off in these two words – don’t you wish your apology/brushoff phrases could be immortalized with flashing lights? I could absolutely imagine this in Lily Allen’s living room.
Liisa LOUNILA “Sorry Luv”, light sculpture, 2009
What these spotlights on emerging art, in this case African art, actually accomplish is polarizing – do these visions end up isolating African art, by focusing on where it comes from? There was nothing pandering about it, really, but it’s a question that lingers.
Anyways, Billie Zangewa uses layers of embroidered cloth to bring added dimension to the color scheme of her piece “Second Act”. A spectacle of acrobats performing to a rapt audience doesn’t necessarily seem to say much about Africa, but the sheen of the silk intricately cut and collaged is a refreshingly singular medium.
Nearby, Seydou Keita’s black-and-white photo from the 1950s of a reclining woman creates a striking visual thanks to incredibly vivid pattern play. The clashing patterns are somehow harmonious: the woman is draped in a floral dress, has polka dot kerchief tied around her head, and lies upon a checkered spread behind which a swirled cloth background is suspended.
By contrast, David Goldblatt’s 1972-era black-and-white photos have a much more raw quality. His photo of a shop assistant (below) shows the subject eyeing the camera suspiciously. Lined behind him are rows of canned products: Jungle OATS, Red Robin Canned Peas, syrup-soaked Bartlett pears, and, for 19c, Chicken with Rice in a can.
David GOLDBLATT The Modi’s daughter in their shop before its destruction under the Group Areas Act, Fietas, Silver Gelatin, 1977
Barry Flanagan’s ink on paper sketches of nudes were incredibly beautiful in their minimalism. One sketch depicts a nude woman kneeling over a table, arched over a piece of paper, face and neck eclipsed behind a vase of flowers in the foreground. The line is tremulous but soft, capturing the woman’s corporeality beautifully, while making the surrounding physical objects seem uncertain — a wine glass wobbly, the clean lines of rectangle of white paper distorted.
Perspective is obviously something Flanagan likes to play with – in the neighboring sketch, a woman is seen lying on her back, head towards the viewer. Her eyes are closed, her breasts each veer their separate right-left ways, her lackadaisically raised hips connect to dangling legs. Though she’s nude, there is nothing hypersexualized about her, and the weave of the ink lines capture the vagaries of womanhood.
Nearby, Jaume Plensa’s “Self Portrait as Canetti” series ignores the details and goes for blocky black silhouettes. Thoughts waft up from the silhouette’s heads like steam from a pot of tea, a vertical string of letters spelling out the musing.
Jaume PLENSA, “Self Portrait as Elias Canetti”, Nepal, 77 x 52 cm, 2009
Artist: Jean-François Fourtou’s furniture designs are at once hyperfunctional and totally random. Two small-scale models are on display – one of a sliding table top that doubles as a slip-cover for a bath. The neighboring model is that of a bed with an armoire built around it, covered in black and white photos. The bed flips up and recedes into the armoire, revealing the underside as a black-and white photo. This art and blends into the bed-armoire-cum art gallery. There are photos of the actual, proper-scale versions of these pieces. Pretty ingenious use of space — especially of interest given the limits of tiny Paris apartments. An actual-sized desk is the showpiece. It consists of a glass-top desk, chair, and wood waste bin which are mirrored in inverse upside down. Thanks to the help of large bookcase that keeps them straddled apart, the two chairs desktops and wastebins are a single unit but functional structure.
The most curious aspect of Fourtou’s creations was the snail shells affixed to the desk/bookcase, and along the walls of the gallery. The coils brought a natural we’re-in-a-prairie type charm to the great indoors, and yet they were at the same time I bet they’d be disconcerting to have in your apartment. Imagine looking up from your computer and see a snail shell the size of bike helmet on your wall.
Jean-François FOURTOU, “Escargot”, Resin and different materials, 107 x 33 x 30cm, 1999
Brighu Sharma’s pieces are each numbered instead of titled as part of Sharma’s “Short Stories” series. Her watercolor and pencil illustrations (below) fuse disparate elements together like, creating a kind of unfamiliar dreamscape, but her style is somewhat reminiscent of Marcel Dzama’s.
Across the wall, Nibha Sikander’s découpage confronts the notion of female form by collaging clothing pattern instructions, shaped into corset and bra silhouettes. Pasting onto handmade paper backgrounds, red lines are drawn upon the underwear to emphasize to breasts and nipples. The mechanics of the body and shaping and distorting it are paralleled by the use of geometrical folds of the clothing pattern instructions.
Gerber babies and dick jokes do not usually go in the same thought bubble. Unless you’re Michaela Spiegel, apparently! Spiegel’s taken the ‘recycled art’ thing for a run by retouching vintage photos of well-behaved young’uns with gouache. The series “Images d’Enfance Perdue” uses black and white snaps of kids propped sweetly on stools, standing behind faux pastoral backgrounds, and accepting communion — and expertly defaced with drawings of syringes, swords, hand grenades, sexy long gloves, earrings, knives, crowns of thorns, or, yes, dicks. Children of yore—beneath those starched collars and pressed pants, they were so kinky!!
Claudia Gambadoro’s “Box” video installation has a totally different take on childishness. Her video is played from the back of a sideways-turned cardboard box. The interior walls are sketched with rooms like a flat dollhouse. The video at the bottom of the box shows a girl inside a large box (meta!) drawing all the rooms and accessories of a house on the walls, and her lines continue with an increasing frenzy, drawing over and over until the drawings are not recognizable. Gambadoro touches on the creativity of a child’s imagination to create entire worlds with bare materials, while also playing on the claustrophobia of playing house and the constraints of modern living.
