Le Carillon de Big Ben 1
Group show
Artists: Leonor Antunes, Renée Levi, Bojan Šarčević. Special guest: Didier Rittener
Curatorship: Claire Le Restif
When Gilles Drouault invited me to the Galerie de Multiples, I accepted with the firm intention not to make an exhibition but to produce a project. So as not to be passing through and to inscribe this proposal in the history of the gallery, in the long run. I immediately felt like inviting foreign artists with whom I had already had the opportunity to work, on a completely different scale.
The intimate setting of the gallery indicated to me certain notions such as scale, format, measurement, unfolding and folding.
This is what we see in the proposal of Leonor Antunes (born in 1972). The triangulation system that constitutes her work is directly inspired by the system of measurement of the Meridian Arc invented by two astronomical surveyors, Delambre and Méchain, between Dunkirk and Barcelona, between 1792 and 1798. In her artistic work, she reconsiders, grasps, retains, studies through free and personal reading: a form, a fragment, a plan. Moreover, duplication is one of her major preoccupations. One of her first catalogs was entitled Duplicate: Manifesto.
Bojan Šarčević’s work is very much based on questions of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. The multiple proposed by Bojan Šarčević (born in 1974) evokes a small shelf. This sculpture, a fragile structure, in a way reconsiders the ambiguity with which Bauhaus designers produced objects on the edge of art, in series.
Renée Levi (born 1960) is a painter. She works with a form of painting deployed in space. But she also produces paintings. Here she responds with an image. Against the light, dazzled, Renée Levi hides her eyes. In front of her, we can guess a skip in which she plunged some of her paintings on a frame, still wrapped up. The intensity of the colors she uses, the fluorescents in particular, which electrify the space and give a vibration to the context, remain silent. It is a distant, humorous image that Levi entrusts to us, especially since she invited Olivier Mosset to write a text on this image, he who is only interested, he says, in painting.
After a discussion about a publishing project, I wanted to invite Didier Rittener to take part in this project. This artist is interested in collective memory (multiple images, from scholarly or popular books) and individual memory linked to the personal selection that we make through this multiplicity of images. In his manifesto book Libre de droits - the title comes from the visual encyclopaedias L’aventurine which proposes old representations free of rights which can be reproduced and from which one can be inspired - he challenges the notion of originality and uses existing sources which I wished to associate with this exhibition.
For reusing existing forms, it must be remembered, is a language. The game continues!
Artists biography
Born in 1972 in Lisbon. Lives and works in Berlin.
Born in 1960 in Istanbul, Turkey. Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. http://reneelevi.ch/
Born in 1974, in Belgrade. Lives and works in Berlin and Paris.
Born in Lausanne in 1969, Didier Rittener is a painter, drawer and sculptor.
