manifest abstraction

MANIFEST
ABSTRACTION
PATRICK BERNIER ET OLIVE MARTIN, JULIEN BOUILLON,
ISABELLE CORNARO, RAFFAELLA DELLA OLGA,
CHLOÉ DUGIT-GROS, LIAM GILLICK, PETER HALLEY,
JEAN-BENOIT LALLEMANT, AURÉLIE MOURIER,
ALEXANDRE PÉRIGOT, JULIEN PRÉVIEUX
CURATOR: KEREN DETTON
GUIDE #86
JANUARY 19 - MAY 5, 2013
MANIFEST
ABSTRACTION
PATRICK BERNIER ET OLIVE MARTIN,
JULIEN BOUILLON, ISABELLE CORNARO,
RAFFAELLA DELLA OLGA, CHLOÉ DUGIT-GROS,
LIAM GILLICK, PETER HALLEY, JEAN-BENOIT
LALLEMANT, AURÉLIE MOURIER, ALEXANDRE
PÉRIGOT, JULIEN PRÉVIEUX
CURATOR : KEREN DETTON
This group exhibition focuses on forms of
abstraction in a contemporary context marked
by dematerialisation of the economy and the
social bond. Here abstraction is seen not as
the opposite of representation, but on the
contrary, as a marker of an ideological context.
Drawing on technical skills like jewellerymaking, weaving and painting, and on different
representational systems – statistics,
cartography, heraldry – the artists conduct
formal explorations which connect up with
historical contingencies and today’s political
scene. Playing on the different implications of
the term «manifest», the exhibition title echoes
the «artistic manifestos» which characterised
the succession of modern avant-gardes, with
their cult of progress and liberal determinism.
If, as is now the case, artists choose to address
the world through abstract forms, it is because
they have doubts about the self-evident nature
of its signs. They manifest the limitations
of ideal abstraction through recourse to
media and technologies that enrich their
visual vocabulary with a social dimension.
Maintaining a paradoxical relationship with
the autonomous art object, they often work
in series, preferring approaches embedded
in time and repetition. In doing so they merge
different temporalities and narrative modes,
the better to challenge the self-evidence of
visible worlds.
ROOM 1: HISTORIES RECLAIMED
Behind the seeming opacity of aesthetic choices,
these artists effect connections between the
origins of the decorative motifs they use and the
materials chosen, between their economic and
symbolic values. The loom suggests a traditional
technique, but is at the same time a symbol of
the rise of industrialism, while the jewels
forming an African landscape remind us of the
origin of their matter and the way they circulate.
Here the mapping of military bombardments and
simulations of rebellions are stripped of their
referents so as to thwart the dictatorship of
images. In their mixing of several narrative
registers, these artists speculate about the
«visibility» of the political, social and economic
situation.
Patrick Bernier et Olive Martin
Since meeting at the École des Beaux-Arts in
Paris in the late 1990s, Patrick Bernier and
Olive Martin have been working on joint
interrogations of the concepts of identity and
territory, with particular emphasis on
exemplars of these concepts in crisis. With
L’Échiqueté they once more home in on bearers
of shifting, paradoxical identities in a constant
state of negotiation and redefinition; in this
case a forebear born in Guadeloupe who
worked as a colonial administrator in Africa
from 1935–1962. The composition of an official
photograph taken in Niger in 1961 – the placing
of its principal subjects on a military parade
ground, the troubling match between the
colours of their skin and their suits – led the
artists to imagine a transposition of the scene
into a chess diagram. The outcome was the
two artworks/tools presented here: a variant
on chess, L’Échiqueté (2011-2012) and Le
Déparleur (2011-2012), a nomadic loom based
on a traditional West African model.
Isabelle Cornaro
Isabelle Cornaro’s work investigates systems
of representation and the notion of value in art
history. Making play with the boundaries
between working document, decorative
artefact and work of art, she transposes
objects, forms of language and real spaces into
abstract shapes. Savane autour de Bangui et le
fleuve Utubangui (Grassland around Bangui and
the River Utubangui, 2007) creates African
landscapes out of arrangements of jewellery
on a sheet of plywood. Combining the historical
and the political, these landscapes
simultaneously reference the colonial
presence in Africa and symbolise a singular,
private history.
Jean-Benoit Lallemant
Jean-Benoit Lallemant explores the
connections between painting, digital imagery
and iconic forms, and their circulation within
the graphics, cinema and TV industries. A new,
dematerialised iconography – logos, desktop
wallpapers, animated gifs – becomes grounds
for speculation about the nature of the
reproducible, transformable images put into
circulation using today’s digital tools.
Contrasting this iconography with traditional
painting procedures, the artist experiments
with a new approach to the support, the object
and the very practice of painting. Trackpad, US
drone strike, Waziristan 2012 (2013) and
Trackpad, US drone strike, Yemen 2012 (2013)
Manifest Abstraction – Guide #86
refer us to American air strikes in Pakistan and
Yemen during 2012. Here Lallemant uses
ballistic missile site maps drawn up by press
agencies and published on the internet, adding
in the points of impact and interconnecting
them with the aid of an invisible mechanism
that brings the painting to life.
Julien Prévieux
The world of work, with its specific economy
and procedures, is what drives Julien Prévieux
in his subverting of the mechanisms and
functioning of various business sectors.
Implementing a counter-productivity strategy,
the artist denounces the dehumanising effects
of many current modes and fields of
production. Here he opposes knitting by hand
to the global textile industry: the series of five
pullovers D’octobre à février (modèle
Rébellion) (From October to February
[Rebellion Model], 2010) borrows its patterns
from a computer model that can simulate a
social uprising, with each item embodying a
stage in the process, from emergence to
dissolution.
Colour code: Yellow: serene person / Orange:
conversion to the revolt / Red: person in revolt
/ Blue: forces of law and order / Grey:
neutralised person / Black: building and
territory.
ROOM 2: MANUAL MODELLINGS
Our relationship with the world functions
through interfaces (computer screens,
Internet portals) and modellings (diagrams, 3D)
whose forms influence the current vocabulary
of geometrical abstraction. Because the codes
involved have intruded on our modes of access
to the world to the point of replacing them,
artists see abstract language as a tool for
representing reality and capable of linking up
with it. Both shaping its context and being
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shaped by it, this abstract language also
becomes an instrument of creation and
reinvention.
Julien Bouillon
Julien Bouillon is a distinctive artist/
anthropologist bent on investigating the status
of objects and images, in terms not only of their
ambiguity and strangeness, but also of their
cultural destiny. His approach centres on a
detached reconfiguration of signs and symbols
out of which images re-emerge. Part of a
series, Grid 5 (2012) is a gate whose metal
structure echoes that of Google’s Gmail
interface. The grille is somewhat reminiscent
of the works of Peter Halley and their
ambiguous association of communication
circuits with spaces of confinement (see Room
3). Corporate Suite #35 (2012) puts on paper a
digital design system regularly used for junk
emails. Shapes and colours are randomly
generated so as to elude spam filters while
creating a new kind of pop aesthetic.
Julien Prévieux
L’Atelier de dessin - B.A.C. du 14ème
arrondissement de Paris (Drawing Workshop,
14th District Crime Squad, Paris, 2011)
comprises drawings made by four Paris police
officers. Working with the artist, the officers
analysed the functioning of Voronoi diagrams, a
mapping technique used by American police
forces to provide a quick overview of crime
locations so that patrols can be organised
accordingly. The artist offered this method to
the crime squad officers in the traditional,
laborious form of a drawing workshop. Lacking
the calculating power of a computer, the project
rechannels the effectiveness of the tool into a
fresh situation in which discussions about the
reality of what is being done intersect with a
technical exploration of drawing rendered
abstract by this unusual context.
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From left to right: Cambriolages, mars et avril
2011, Paris 75014 (réalisé par Blaise Thomas) /
Vols à la roulotte, novembre 2004, Paris 75017
(réalisé par Gérald Fidalgo) / Cambriolages,
août et septembre 2010, Paris 75014 (réalisé
par Benjamin Ferran) / Cambriolages, octobre
et novembre 2010, Paris 75014 (réalisé par
Benjamin Ferran).
Aurélie Mourier
Aurélie Mourier makes lists of shapes
suggested by everyday objects, geometry and
her own imagination, models them using 3D
software and comes up with voxellated
(3D-pixellated) representations set in a 25-unit
cubic matrix. Once classified and analysed, the
models are made manually. In this particular
case the artist tackles a mathematical problem
going back to ancient times: the squaring of the
circle, which involves creating a square of the
same area as a circle using only a ruler and
compass. In everyday parlance «squaring the
circle» has come to mean trying to solve an
insoluble problem. Juggling with different
scales and transposing the two shapes into
volumes, Mourier succeeds in inserting one
into the other, subjecting virtual representation
to the weight of matter and the constraints of
space, and thus anchoring the work to the
entire exhibition venue.
Jean-Benoit Lallemant
Inspired by data circulation on the Internet, the
installation Deadware (2012) shows a
constantly moving surface of clicks. Cut up like
confetti into inanimate witnesses to web page
consultations, these cursors are transposed
into a random shape impervious to the
concepts of quantity, space and time.
Scattered through space, the arrows leave the
mark of their movement on the entire exhibition
venue.
Le Quartier, Contemporary Art Center of Quimper
ROOM 3: MODERNISM AND SUBVERSION
For Peter Halley geometry, long a guarantee of
stability, order and proportion for artists, now
embodies a range of constantly shifting
signifiers. Acknowledging the modernist
legacy, which saw types of abstraction from
Constructivism to Minimalism via Abstract
Expressionism assert themselves, then move
from the pictorial context to architecture and
the decorative arts, these artists have adopted
its lines, colours and textures while introducing
other components and making play with
fragmentation and overlaying. While the works
brought together here heighten our visual
pleasure, they do so the better to integrate the
possibility of a critique that indexes the
alienating circumstances of post-industrial
societies. Thus they respond to the modernist
ideology of rationality and transparency by
subverting its forms and concepts.
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick’s drawings, sculptures,
installations, books and films could be described
as scenarios, fictions and histories that are
sometimes in the process of being written. As
such they enable speculation about the
relationships between the artist, the institution
and the public. Fired by an urge to share the
creation of meaning, Gillick offers situations in
which completion of the work hinges on input
from different participants. Big Conference
Centre Middle Management Platform is part of a
series begun in 2000. Resembling furniture in
their mix of decoration, interior design and
Minimalist sculpture, in the exhibition venue
these artefacts – the artist calls them
«discussion platforms» – give the impression
of being «tools» for setting up interconnections
between people, spaces and objects. Thus they
establish a place for reflection and dialogue,
inviting visitors to exchange opinions about the
work and the current exhibition.
Manifest Abstraction – Guide #86
Julien Prévieux
This collection of «abstract» pictures takes the
form of a range of geometrical shapes
accompanied by different statements. The
combinations are borrowed from the covers of
social science books from the 1970s, but with
the text-image relationship reversed: it is no
longer the image that illustrates the title, but
rather the text as a caption for the image. The
graphics in these books take their inspiration
from various abstract art movements, thus
relating a social issue to a formal history. To
what extent can an abstract motif model
questions like education, modern psychiatry,
economics and the public interest?
Isabelle Cornaro
In L’espace rationalisé du temps libre (The
Rationalised Space of Spare Time, 2005),
Isabelle Cornaro appropriates the map of
Coney Island, making visible the analogy
between the layout of its amusement areas and
a Fordist production diagram. Transposed onto
vellum paper, these printed shapes,
reminiscent of Minimalist reliefs, point up the
standardised planning of the space.
This rationalisation of economic procedures is
applied here to the arrangement of both leisure
and working areas.
Peter Halley
A pioneer of the Neo-Geo current that
appeared in New York’s East Village in 1984,
Peter Halley makes series of abstract
geometrical pictures inspired by the history of
American painting, New Wave music,
Structuralist theory and postmodernism.
Working with industrial paint, he uses the
recurrent motifs of the square, the grid and the
pipe, which, aside from the formal issues
posed by pictorial space, constitute
architectural diagrams of a form of social
organisation. His Prison (1989) is part of a
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series begun in the early 1980s. The prison, the
cell and the pipes reference the writings of
Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard regarding
incarceration in a space conditioned by the
industrial social structure. Deploying acrylic
and fluorescent Day-Glo paint, Halley
denounces kitsch mysticism and the capacity
for alienation of a geometrically laid-out city
where people’s movements are governed by
the same model as the digital information
network and underground utilities.
Chloé Dugit-Gros
Chloé Dugit-Gros’s practice is marked by
freedom of choice in terms of materials and
tools, together with references running to
B-movies, hip-hop, popular urban culture,
press cuttings, archives and art history. In her
work an encounter between a postmodern
vocabulary and the precepts of modernist
abstraction – gridding, geometry of forms,
chromatic reduction – fuels a subjective
approach to reality. The two works here,
Peinture vaudou (Voodoo Painting, 2008) and
Fils conducteurs (Guiding Threads, 2008),
remind us of Minimalist sculpture and the
concerns of the Support-Surface movement,
although the character of their extendable
components excludes any rigid classification.
The formal stringency of these works is
coordinated with both their potential for
transformation and their underlying origins.
ROOM 4: VIRTUAL ECONOMIES
Economics is sometimes a subjacent factor in
artists’ choice of materials, not only as a
political given in their work, but also as a visual
resource. Monetary value has cut free of the
material world, becoming in the process a
reality which, while abstract and autonomous,
nonetheless influences our representations
and our emotions. Here the artists reclaim its
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signs – old coins, stock market values, credit
rating systems – in a denunciation of its
evident evils. In an approach that is visual,
poetic and not without a touch of humour, they
find other echoes for their symbols, negotiate
the breaks with lived experience and thus
reconfigure the spectacle of the everyday.
Raffaella della Olga
In her performances, collages and installations,
Raffaella della Olga works with the
simultaneous apparition of texts and images,
and brings out their everyday significance with
her use of the economic language that
dominates international politics. Value curves
and assessment tools created by the rating
agencies are reworked on the page or on
different fabrics to produce authentic visual
poems. In Aladdin (2013) the agencies’ rating
system for countries is pulled out of its frame
of reference and put through the prism of the
artist’s subjectivity. Squares of fabric function
like blank pages, receiving typographic poems
whose vertical, horizontal and diagonal shapes
have a dynamism of their own. Typed out and
sewn together, they make up a tablecloth
delineating a concrete space.
For Wall Street Mandala (2012) the artist
tweaks stock exchange indexes found in the
national and international press. The graph
lines are cut out and glued side by side to form
concentric circles; this system of loops
recreates unity out of a jumble of fragments,
while the manual cutting-out process adds a
look of fragility to the random flows that
produced these lines.
Julien Bouillon
In representing a series of gold coins so as to
point up the way money has been dissociated
from any reference to precious substances,
Julien Bouillon creates a parallel with the art
market: value system, circulation of works,
Le Quartier, Contemporary Art Center of Quimper
speculation, etc. On untreated canvas, as if in a
coin collector’s vitrine, Représentation
universelle 4 (Universal Representation 4,
2012) offers illusionistic coinage mixing ancient
models with such unlikely or anachronistic
examples as skulls and eurocents. Like Andy
Warhol, whose banknote paintings punned on
their own value, Bouillon reminds us that a
picture’s value is subject to market
fluctuations, just like collections of old coins.
This analogy between economics and art
playfully brings together art history references
– the dots of Pop, the modernist grid, arte
povera’s stripping of the support – in a critique
of the various movements advocating
abstraction and the dematerialisation of the
work of art.
Alexandre Périgot
Alexandre Périgot’s work has its roots in sharp
observation of the relationships between
popular cultural forms and those used in art.
Using different media – video, installation,
photography, music, dance – his works
foreground the spectacularisation of our
society and the new representational models
that emerge in a striving to build an identity. His
video Krach Audition (2013) offers the body
language of the stock exchange as a
dramatisation of the times we live in. In the
media every downward trend is illustrated by
an image of a demoralised, quaking trader
weeping and tearing his hair out. After putting
together a substantial collection of pictures like
these, Périgot asked actor-director Yves-Noël
Genod to perform them: «In a kind of
hypothetical staging, a thunderstruck,
disturbing dance scenario summons the
viewer to share five minutes of a cascade of
movements.»
PROJECT ROOM
TO BE CONTINUED...
19 January - 24 February 2013
Part of the Odyssey of Words reading and
writing festival in Quimper and tying in with
its subject – «Say No to Indifference» – this
screening brings together videos by artists
whose work explores the issue of political
commitment and its media representations.
A choice of aesthetic forms – banners, flags,
ways of dressing, references to past utopias –
brings different sociopolitical realities back to
the surface.
And so, independently of context, image motifs
transformed into real emblems play a major
role in the sharing of social space. The events
become a source of analysis of the images
made, performed and cropped, while at the
same time functioning as repositories for new
desires and hopes going counter to media
clichés. Although treated in different ways,
all the questions addressed in these artists’
videos confirm art’s role as social criticism.
With videos of : Artur Zmijewski,
Ron Haselden, Mounir Fatmi, Dimitry Gutov,
Philippe Parreno, Olga Kisseleva, Sharif Waked.
COMING SOON
KVETA PACOVSKA « UN LIVRE POUR TOI »
1st - 31 March 2013
Openning: Friday1st March at 5:00 pm
THOMAS TUDOUX
5 April - 5 May 2013
Openning: Friday 5 April at 6:30 pm
Manifest Abstraction – Guide #86
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LE QUARTIER, CONTEMPORARY
ART CENTER OF QUIMPER
10, esplanade François Mitterrand
29000 Quimper
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HOW TO FIND US
Follow the signs «Centre ville» the entrance is opposite the Théâtre
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THE BOOKSHOP-CAFÉ
The bookshop is the perfect place for enjoying
a coffee and consulting a range of books
relating to the exhibitions and the current art
scene in Brittany. There are also monthly
presentations of artists’ multiples and art
books for children, as well as regular writing
workshops. The café offers hot and cold
drinks, together with free WiFi access.
NEXT EXHIBITION
Carey Young
25 May - 15 September 2013
GUIDE #86
Contributors: Maëlle Bobet,
Keren Detton, Sylvie Doré, Anna Olszewska.
Graphic Design : Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié
with Caroline Fabès
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The artists : Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin,
Julien Bouillon, Isabelle Cornaro, Raffaella della
Olga, Chloé Dugit-Gros, Liam Gillick,
Peter Halley, Jean-Benoit Lallemant, Aurélie
Mourier, Alexandre Périgot, Julien Prévieux
The lenders : CAPC - musée d’art contemporain
de Bordeaux ; Cnap, centre national des arts
plastiques, Paris ; galerie Jousse entreprise,
Paris ; Emmanuel Didier, Bagnolet - Paris ;
Thibault Poutrel, Paris ; Maryvonne Wattelez,
Asnières-sur-Seine
And : Owen Cole ; Maëva Coppel ;
Entre-deux, Nantes ; Patrick Fournier ;
Christophe et Ghislain Guillerme ;
Grégory Lang ; lycée Yves Thépot, Quimper.
PARTNERS
With the support of the city of Quimper,
the Ministry of Culture and Communication,
the Finistère department and the Brittany
Region