CP RS.indd - Dominique Fiat

dOMINIQUE fiAT,
GALERIE
16, rue des Coutures Saint-Gervais
F-75003 Paris
T +33 1 40 29 98 80
F +33 1 40 29 07 19
E contact@galeriefiat.com
www.galeriefiat.com
COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE
Robert STADLER
exposition 10 septembre - 26 octobre 2004
Designer, Robert Stadler interpelle les lieux d’exposition pour brouiller les catégories usuelles de
classification des objets. Plus que des objets achevés, les objets ici présentés apparaissent comme
des objets-sénarios, les arrêts sur séquence, issus d’un film fictif sur la disparition, que le visiteur est
invité à reconstituer. Expression d’un desir utopique de s’émanciper des objets, l’exposition trouble
leurs statuts allant même jusqu’à effacer l’empreinte du créateur. Cette recherche porte ainsi sur la
matérialisation paradoxale de l’inéluctable processus de disparition des choses.
Pour cette première exposition personnelle en France,
Robert Stadler présente de nouvelles pièces produites
par la galerie Dominique Fiat, ainsi que Pools and
Pouf !, installation récemment montrée dans les expositions Vanishing Point 1 & 2, respectivement à Milan
durant le Salon du meuble et à Vienne (Autriche).
Les Pools constituent un ensemble d’objets capitonnés
en cuir noir, semblables à des flaques. Pouf! est un
tabouret qui niche dans un coin tel un parasite. Les
différentes formes remplissent différentes fonctions,
mais échappent en même temps à une qualification
exacte.
Robert STADLER
Foreveryoung, 2004
Paire d’haltères réalisée à Pietrasanta
Marbre statuaire de Carrare
3,5 kg, édition limitée de 10 Unikats + 2 E.A. (photo)
1,2 kg, édition limitée de 10 Unikats + 2 E.A.
Edition Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris
Photo Patrick Gries
Ce sont des sortes de mutants qui envahissent sols et
murs en jouant avec l’idée de ce qu’est un meuble
ainsi qu’avec le statut de l’objet et son usage.
Parmi les autres pièces présentées notons
Foreveryoung, haltères en marbre de Carrare, ou encore +336+, un mystérieux miroir mural troublant le
reflet du spectatueur au profit de l’apparition d’autres
informations...
Robert Stadler est né en 1966 à Vienne (Autriche). En 1988, il s’installe à Milan. Quatre ans plus
tard, il s’établit à Paris où il co-fonde le groupe RADI DESIGNERS. Depuis 2000, Robert STADLER
développe son travail personnel parallèlement à celui du groupe. En 2002, il obtient la bourse du
FIACRE et part pendant six mois travailler dans la résidence d’artistes de Santa Teresa à Rio de
Janeiro. Aujourd’hui il vit et travaille entre Paris et Rio de Janeiro.
Pendant l’exposition, le travail de Robert STADLER est également pésenté dans :
Open Borders, commissariat : Droog Design, dans le cadre de Lille 2004
Just What Is ItIt, exposition de pièces de la collection du Frac Nord-Pas-de-Calais, dans le cadre de Lille 2004
Design en Stock
Stock, 2000 objets du FNAC (Fonds National d’Art Contemporain) Palais de la Porte Dorée
FIAC, du 21 au 25 octobre 2004, Galerie Dominique Fiat
FIAC
dOMINIQUE fiAT,
GALERIE
Robert STADLER : LOST and FOUND (designer and artist)
In our fleeting and lofty dreams, we would like the multitude of objects which surround us to vanish, or
at least to curb their worrying proliferation. Our interiors, thus transformed into places of inner peace,
would offer the exemplary vision of their pure outline. Such would be the dream: a functionnal one,
perhaps even a designer’s dream.
Robert Stadler’s world is in itself quite dark. It is not necessarly obscure, however the clarity that seems
to impregnate his world can be misleading. Between high-tech surrealism and viscontian flash-backs,
the seduction of forms and substances barely hides a certain anxiety. The artist does not aspire to the
idealised disappearance of objects, but he wishes to tell the story of the elements that are disappearing (somewhat against the current of the avant-garde dogma).
For Lost and Found
Found, his first personnal exhibition in Paris, Robert Stadler proposed five objects, at the
same time independent and complementary, part and whole, word and sentence, each interacting
according to multiple articulations. More than a transfer of his work as a designer from the show room
to the gallery, there is a true redefinition, not only of his production, but also of his activity. Lost and
Found. That which disappears in one place, is found in another.
The question of the nature of the disapperance arises, to which three of the works presented offer a
possible answer. Foreveryoung is a pair of rather large bones, that could be used as weights. However Foreveryoung goes beyond its seductive as well as efficient nature. Indeed, made out of Carrare
marble, this work, that seems to have acquired a patina through time, recalls the ancient classical
sculptures. Thus a once decorative middle-class object is reduced by its design to its very skeleton.
The skeleton of its demise. Foreveryoung makes of the past its very future and creates this fusion in the
myth of eternal youth.
+336+ is a mirror without silvering, equipped with a sms receptor and a presence detector. The mirror, when approached, displays in the transparency of the glass the sent messages. «Do not forget»,
the mirror could be saying to the person who is examining himself/herself, as if to recall the overwhelming presence of technology. Had it been rectangular, the mirror would be quite predictable, easily
located in the world of interactive design. However with its oval shape, just like the marble of Foreveryoung, +336+ integrates the very features that technology and design were supposed to have wipped away: the references to the decorative codes of the 19th century «bourgeois» interiors. Therefore
the hypothesis of objects haunted by the many forms of the past becomes plausible.
Pools & Pouf! completes this referential trilogy. Pools & Pouf! looks somewhat like a sinking Chesterfield, slowly disappearing, like a shipwrecked boat. Soon there will be nothing left. For the time
being there are still some pieces made of black leather spread out like puddles, without any particular
structure. Pools & Pouf! is an exemplary piece of furniture for an anti-world in which all that remains is
a certain concept of decorum.
Two works complete the exhibition, and are in a way its entrance and exit. Using two models of
objects/products, the flower pot and the plastic chair - two «proletarian» objects (the two preceeding
ones were more middle-class) - Robert Stadler paves the territory he wishes to explore.
Play/Pause is still on the borderline of design. It is in fact a game about the evolution of forms and
their process of development. The rule is simple: on the the basis of a flower pot’s geometric characteristics, the computer, with its mechanical ease, generates an infinity of forms.
After defining the rules, Robert Stadler selects the computer generated proposals to create the profile
of a possible object. Thus the ceramics appear. While maintaining a bond with the initial object, like
an inherent genetic code, they are however very different from the original, generic form. A darwinian scheme transpires: we understand that these evolved, sophisticated and «designed» objects
descend directly from their ancestor, a flower pot.
dOMINIQUE fiAT,
GALERIE
On the other hand, Rest in Peace follows an opposite process to the evolutionnist scheme, since it deals with
decline and the degenerative power of time. Rest in Peace is the image of the haunting white plastic chair
which invades our daily scenery, eroded by an unknown form of «plasteoporosis». The chair is no longer part
of the realm of useful objects. There is nothing left of the common white garden chair’s functionnal aspects.
Rest in Peace goes beyond the bounds of no return, of what is possible. Till then Robert Stadler had not yet
gone beyond these boundaries. The object is no longer functionnal, no longer between art and design. We
are before an object within the realm of sculpture.
It is paradoxical that the poorest object is the most redefined. It is not surprising however that the object which
carries the most negative connotations succeeds in its complete redefinition. Thus like a journey made without
realising it is being completed, perhaps a parallel with the metamorphosis of the designer into an artist, the
objects also reveal themselves as being of a different kind, separate from their initial form. While seductive
and aesthetically pleasing, the works are also in a zone of twilight. One could even claim that a distant echo
of the grand Austro-Hungarian empire resounds in the work of Robert Stadler.
Eric Tabuchi (translated from French)