ART NEWS:Dec.01

The term emerging often applies to young artists. However, youth in art can be a relative conception, which might not necessarily have to be associated with age. Or what could be said of these generations of artists who remained unknown throughout their life, only to be rediscovered after their death? In the exhibition “BRICKS & CLICKS #4 // Le Duel” the work of Jean-Louis Delbès is juxtaposing with the work of Ken Sortais. Jean-Louis Delbès graduated from the Fine Art School of Marseille in 1980. His thematic and formal explorations are diverse: from Pop Art to narrative figuration, from a study of traces left on the docks through time to the “masts” conjuring a certain reading of art history. Jean-Louis Delbès’ main media is painting but he also uses other techniques such as drawing or collage. Ken Sortais graduated from the Fine Art School of Paris in 2010, he lives and works in Saint-Denis. Sculptures, videos, paintings, Ken Sortais’ practice is varied, often synthesized in immersive installations which propel the spectator in a familiar yet uncertain environment, maintaining a permanent ambivalence between reality and illusion, what is said and what is touched, the visible and the hidden. Info: Curators: Stéphane Corréard and Romain Semeteys, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, 5 rue Chapon, Paris, Duration: 1/12/17-13/1/18, Days & Hours: tue-Fri 10:30-12:30 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 12:00-19:00, http://galeriegaillard.com

The exhibition “Constructing Constructivism” with works from Juan Carlos Maldonado Art Collection (JCMAC) explores the role of geometric abstraction in the mid-20th Century within an extensive international context. While widely embraced in Europe and Latin America, Geometric Abstraction never found a wide audience in the US. This exhibition aims to revisit the achievements of wide array of artists from the Americas and Europe and to open a dialog on the importance of the geometric abstract style in the development of what we know as contemporary art. Featuring paintings, sculptures and drawings from JCMAC’s exceptional survey of artworks focused on geometric abstraction from Latin America, Europe and the United States, Constructing Constructivism advances the possibilities of global integration by focusing on mutual influences and exchanges among artists and movements across three continents. Info: Curator: M Carlota Perez-Appelbaum, Juan Carlos Maldonado Art Collection (JCMAC), Design District, 3841 NE 2nd Avenue, Suite 201, Miami, Duration: 1/12/17-15/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30:00-17:00, Sat 11:00-16:00, www.jcmac.art

At a time when the notion of belief is particularly fraught, the exhibition “Secular Icons in an Age of Moral Uncertainty”, with works by: Nathan Coley, Mimosa Echard, Simon Fujiwara, Sara Naim and Indrė Šerpytytė, examines contemporary takes on some of the objects we turn to for meaning or solace. Pictures, screens, movies, and commodities are filtered here through formally abstract conceptual propositions, linked by a sense of indeterminacy. Taking its title from Nathan Coley’s eponymous grids of fairground lights, the exhibition brings together forms of image-making which, while redolent of an art history spanning from Byzantine icon painting to 20th-century avant-gardes, decidedly engage with the now. Which ‘now’ they specifically address, though, remains open to interpretation: is it the lure of gore, of entertainment, of luxury? More than the objects themselves, what’s under scrutiny in the exhibition is the act of looking, the dynamics driving our gaze, and the multitude of projections a collection of pieces so radically distinct encourages. Info: Curator: Coline Milliard, Parafin, 18 Woodstock Street, London, Duration: 1/12/17-3/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue–Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.parafin.co.uk

The exhibition “The Whiteness of the Whale” brings together three bodies of work by Paul Graham made in the United States: “American Night” (1998-02), “a shimmer of possibility” (2004-06) and “The Present” (2009-11). The title, which refers to one of the chapters of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (1851), alludes to the blindness of men and to the idea that obsessive search for something could lead to destruction. Although they were not conceived as such, there is a compelling case for regarding them now as unified series of works, linked not only by common subject matter but also by underlying themes and ideas that have developed, in part, from Graham’s response to the social landscape of America since he began making photographs there in 1998. It is true that the three works gain much of their immediate visual charge from this new national context, from an encounter with a specific cultural geography and with what are at times desperate social circumstances.Info: Curator: Christopher McCall, Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Av. Burjassot, 54, Valencia, Duration: 1/12/17-27/5/18, Wed-Sat 11:00-14:00 & 16:00-20:00, Sun 11:00-15:00, www.bombasgens.com

In his body of work “Walking In The City”, John Miller presents five silkscreen paintings, ten coffee mugs, and a digital slide show, all of which refer to how people inhabit public spaces. He has drawn inspiration from Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” from his “ThePractice of Everyday Life”(1980). The silkscreen paintings derive from drawings that Miller made based on photographs he has shot in different locations. Put simply, these are sketches of ordinary scenarios that one might find in many cities.  The values in these paintings are very close so as to suggest mirages, hallucinations or after-images. The center of the space features an arrangement of coffee cups. For these Miller photographed commuters from overhead at the new PATH train station at the World Trade Center and had these printed on the cups In the third part of the show, Miller examines contemporary urban space via an eight-minute PowerPoint slideshow. Info: Praz-Delavallade, 5 rue des Haudriettes, Paris, Duration: 2/12/17-13/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.praz-delavallade.com

Olivier Foulon occupies himself with the properties of photographic images. He mounts the prints of the images on cardboard, one next to the other. This leads to a series, formed not by personal selection but by the multitude of printouts of moments of an expression. He selects the motifs from the world around him. Olivier Foulon shows things as they are; things that we see and know. But he does this with an immediacy that makes them appear uneasy and even uncanny. The title “Hard Return” selected by Foulon for his exhibition derives from the computer command designating a forced line break that even stays in place when one inserts and deletes text.  A hard technical break dividing form and content making a return to the existing difficult. Foulon is not interested in this break as a caesura between the words of any text but precisely between the two words “hard” and “return” and their relation to his occupation with the pictorial object. Info: Curator: Regina Barunke, Temporary Gallery, Centre for contemporary art, Mauritiuswall 35, Cologne, Duration 2/12/17-4/3/18, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-sun 13:00-17:00, www.temporarygallery.org

Organised by the Malian Ministry of Culture and the Institut français, Les Rencontres de Bamako is the leading international platform dedicated to contemporary photography and new images in Africa. The 11th African Biennale of Photography is called “Afrotopia”, echoing the book by Senegalese intellectual Felwine Sarr, reflects a commitment to ensuring that this historic and pioneering biennale for photography is integral to the new Pan-African forces for change, to embracing them and contributing to them. The Pan-African exhibition, at the National Museum of Mali, is beating heart of the Biennale. 40 proposals have been chosen among over 300 applications from artists and collectives based across the African continent or in its diasporas. Through their great diversity of approaches and visual languages, the artists generate alternative narratives about Africa that build new bonds with the past, shed light on the present and open perspectives for the future. Other exhibitions displayed in Bamako’s main cultural venues, including the National Museum of Mali, the epicentre of the event, the Musée du District, the Galerie Médina, the Institut français and the National Park. Info: Curator: Marie-Ann Yemsi, 11th African Biennale of Photography, National Museum of Mali – Musée du District – the Institut Français and Galerie Médinab, Bamako, Mali, Duration 2/12/17-31/1/18, www.rencontres-bamako.com

Pierre Clerk lives and works in New York and France. He draws his artistic references from the “painting with scissors” collage works by Matisse, the cubism of Picasso, the forms of Brancusi and van Doesburg and the Neo-Plasticism movement driven by Mondrian. Actively part of the New York buzzing artistic scene in the 1970’s, Pierre Clerk’s singular works are based on a very personal spatially graphic language – often going against the current of the contemporary trends of his time. While at the end of 1960’s Abstract Expressionist painters triumph, Pierre Clerk focused on an rational approach. And if the work of the artist is much more purely formal than that of Leger for example, for whom he has a profound admiration, he retains from the master’s research the interest for colour that is at the same time volume, form, and capable of transforming bodies into cogs of the great chromatic mechanics of a work. Info: Galerie Thomas Bernard-Cortex Athletico, 13 rue des Arquebusiers, Paris, Duration: 2/12/17-18/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-19:00, www.galeriethomasbernard.com

To investigate what photography is becoming, Fotomuseum Winterthur launched its new format SITUATIONS two years ago. SITUATIONS features a dynamic programme that responds to current developments within photographic culture and experiments with innovative interactions of physical and digital spaces. The group exhibition “SITUATIONS/Post Fail” examines the moment just after the narratives that consider technological development as an unquestionable phenomenon have failed. The cluster offers a clear and cruel representation of a world in which both utopian and dystopian narratives disappoint and the idea of “future” itself has failed, leaving the field clear for a much more complex and contradictory understanding of our present condition. This representation has bid farewell to the realist paradigm of photography, searching instead for new ways to capture and express the reality of our “post fail condition” through post-photographic practices. Starting from the global economic crisis and the cultural and social contradictions it revealed, the artworks exhibited investigate visual stereotypes as well as our everyday relationship with image production. Info: Curator: Matteo Cremonesi, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45, Zurich, Duration: 2/12/17-4/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.fotomuseum.ch

In 1967, Michel Foucault created the idea of “absolutely other spaces” that he called heterotopias, including those which a child creates in order to reign over a world that is parallel to the one dominated by adults.Contrary to a utopia, a heterotopia indeed acts like a counter-space, a welcoming place for what Harald Szeeman would qualify as an “individual mythology”. Likewise, such a space also evokes Fernand Deligny’s lines of wandering, Raymond Roussel’s locus solus, or Réné Daumal’s Mount Analogue.  In the group exhibition “Hétérotopies-Architectures Habitées”, these “inhabitable” worlds are paradoxically, the product of those whom we believe to be absent from the world. Whether they invent them or the invest them, these projections not only reterritorialize them, protect them, but at the same time offer their authors the foundation of a new value system; a group of localized rules, turning out to be more viable for the person seeking reprieve from the weight of alienating norms. Info: Curator: Matali Crasset, Christian Berst Art Brut, 3-5, passage des Gravilliers, (entrance 10, rue chapon), Paris, Duration: 9/12/17-20/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, www.christianberst.com