Exposition Ombre et lumière
David Galimant - Aki Kuroda - Benoit Lemercier - Beatriz Moreno
Gladys Nistor - Maryline Pomian - Dominique Rembauville - Anne-Sophie Viallon
26 mai - 26 juin 2018
After her last exhibition was filled with colors, Véronique de Lavenne is now presenting the opposite end of the spectrum in her living room, which serves as a pop-up art gallery. Ombre et Lumière (‘Shadow and Light’) shows photographs, sculptures, paintings, works in paper and on paper that are all primarily black and white.
The focus is on the role black plays for artists who create or reinvent their art using the elementary formal means of black and white to produce rhythm, contrast, night and day, and to create entire worlds.
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Each artist has agreed to exhibit previously unseen artworks that correspond with the theme of shadow and light. Ombre et Lumière features Aki Kuroda’s black painting from the Midnight Spaghetti series, photographs by Beatriz Moreno, sculptures by Benoit Lemercier, drawings by Anne-Sophie Viallon, boxes by Gladys Nistor and Dominique Rembauville. These works are presented in dialogue with cigarette paper sculptures by Maryline Pomian, l’Arbre (The Tree) by David Galimant, and a gold leaf etching by Aki Kuroda.
Véronique de Lavenne
David Galimant The détournement of objects from everyday life is the basis of David Galimant’s artwork. Sensitive to their expressive force and natural esthetics, he values their shape and matter in unusual works that are playful and intuitive as they obtain new functions. With noteworthy simplicity and originality, his work endows everyday objects with timeless poetry. L’Arbre (The Tree) is a sculpture or “lamp-painting” to be hung on a wall. Its design and structure, with the shadows it casts and its electric wires, make it a true work of art. Creating a peaceful, tranquil, and soothing atmosphere, L’Arbre is much more than a source of light. A homage to trees and to the art of living, L’Arbre is a “tree of life” that reflects our era with its trend of returning to nature.
Aki Kuroda Filled with great inner resources, Aki Kuroda creates passages through the diverging worlds of modern and contemporary art, the Orient and the West, the body and the universe, mythology and the future. He takes viewers on a journey from which they cannot return unaffected, thus feeling constantly reborn. Taken to the depths of darkness, one reemerges more alive. Going toward another world, into shadow and light, nature and the city, one moves from one’s interior reality to the immensity of the universe. In this maelstrom of microcosms and macrocosms in which the past, present and future intermingle, Aki Kuroda gives birth to an oasis where everything is in motion. “Shadows, First Night, Darkness in Paradise, Black Sponge, Dark Ear Curvatures, Black Garden, Nighttime. Shadow, darkness, night, shadows, black, yet Kuroda is not driven by a morbid affection for concealed darkness. The artist observes and accepts the natural alternation between two opposing phenomena: shadow and light. The one does not exist without the other. Who seeks light, whether interior or exterior, must necessarily pass through darkness. Rembrandt’s art perfectly illustrates the principle in western art.”
Laurent Manœuvre in the Kuroda monograph, Maeght Éditeur, 2002 (page 106
Dominique Rembauville Painting, collage, photography, and writing converge in Dominique Rembauville’s work. This allows the artist to produce pictorial narratives in which the subject matter and materials offer contrasts to the transparency of the glass or plexiglass and the often monochromatic palette employed. His practice thereby tends toward the desired effect of differing textures and the multiple disciplines through which the artist materializes his vision of time and space. Writing, photography, painting, and posters mounted on Diasec give form to a concentration of the marks and emotions of being. “Painting or choosing to employ black and white on any support matters to me because it shows the essence of a line or shape. It sets us before a truth without gimmicks or insincerity. Choosing these two chromatic extremes takes us straight to the heart of an artwork. Their duality provides a work with emphasis and attracts the gaze to the real subject. In the moment between seeing and mental construing, the mind cannot forego the essential.” - Dominique Rembauville
Anne-Sophie Viallon “It is a matter of more than shadow and light here. It is also about ‘voids’ and ‘solids’, darkness and transparency, the past and the future, of black and white. In this work which seeks to be ‘between’ shadow and light, the former cannot exist without the latter. An immobile body that is seated with the head turned to the background is both a bridge between the viewer and background and a vector. What extends beyond broadens our gaze, our perception, and our thinking.” - Anne Sophie Viallon “There is no need to look for a key element by isolating such or such an aspect or by determining a chronology. It all points to a whole that the beholder must construct when Anne-Sophie Viallon creates gaps, hollows, shadows, and voids in which figures resonate with great intensity. An Ariadne's thread leads us through the labyrinth of creation. But it’s a broken thread. And, should one focus on it, the particularly present feminine signifier is misleading. The delicate, fragile drawing is actually hurt by an incisive thread which at once irrigates and amputates. Colors in marker pen spring out from blank grounds and cast light like memory flashes or blackouts in the overall fabric of one phrasing.” - Michel Gathier
Gladys Nistor's ethereal work is mischievous and paradoxical as it bravely shines light on an imaginary realm. A sculptor of space, Gladys Nistor balances shadow and light as she creates floating works. By producing intense contrasts with striking simplicity and fascinating powers of illusion, the Gladys Nistor’s ‘Light Objects’ are uniquely adapted to their surroundings. Order and chaos, strangeness and familiarity, hot and cold, substance and space, shadow and light …. are all variables that she deftly manages to elicit emotions.
Maryline Pomian has chosen to exclusively use cigarette paper as a material. To the artist, its tenuous nature is a metaphor of the human condition. It is also an apt metaphor of life and of how time flies. The fragile, ultrathin nature of cigarette paper contrasts with the artist’s manner of shaping it by crumpling before covering it with printed marks of passing time. “Produced from a barely tangible form of degree zero material, Maryline Pomian breathes life into very plain cigarette paper by creasing and unwrinkling it as she sculpts air. Her graphic work is imbued with poetry in which shadow and light as well as voids and masses playfully interact. Her works are somewhat ascetic, as if made by an architect. They are also Oulipian due to the constraints she imposes on herself.” Bertrande Barousky
Beatriz Moreno Since a childhood spent in a house inhabited by death, Beatriz Moreno has been attracted to what is unspeakable, inexpressible, and turned her photographic work to its spiritual sources when in Toledo, Spain. Her new series Révélation(s) blends shots of sculptures and old master paintings taken in major international museums. This gives a new form of mystery to works until now left immobile in silence. Beatriz Moreno is a born narrator who fashions her images with remarkable dramatic intensity. Her work is intimately poetic with light springing from the lyricism of visually abundant worlds. Nihilism and destruction may be implied but redemption is achieved through a remarkable combination of light and shadow.
