Aurélien Froment

The late works of the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich, have been a source of puzzlement and sometimes even embarrassment to art historians. Previously known for his 'non-objectivist', utterly abstract paintings of around 1920, Malevich rejected the artistic convention of an orderly progression of early, mature and late works and instead, at the start of the 1930s, went backwards. He initially regressed to painting in a proto-cubist style that he had first experimented with around 1914 and then even more bizarrely, to a slapdash Impressionist style. He then painted some of his earlier works again. Even odder, the artist back-dated these 'late' paintings as if dating them were less about when they were made and rather, when they ought have been made.

Time has preoccupied modern artists, from Malevich's construction of a past in the present, to the Futurists embrace of a fascist future, through to On Kawara's date paintings. The French artist Aurélien Froment conceptualises the notion of time as a series of discrete narratives linked through real or imagined time-lines. For Froment, a film-projectionist, 'Going to see a film is like cutting a section in the linearity of time.' Froment argues that life's experiences might be understood through the tools of the filmmaker: 'You have feelings of déjà vu, flashbacks, wrong cuts in editing, slow motion or speeding up.' Froment's works create connections in time and history whereby the potential for a greater narrative emerges.

For his first exhibition at STORE, Froment presents a number of loosely related works; an iceberg shifting on the ocean, a tour guide presenting a city in the process of its construction, floating islands and silhouettes, a page torn out of a book and a wall-mounted bookshelf filled with a number of second-hand books.

And what of Malevich? His final works look like crazed pastiches of Renaissance paintings and he didn't bother back-dating these final ones. Instead he chose the emblem that his abstract suprematist work had repeatedly featured ? the red or black square, and inserted it carefully hidden or reduced in size in the last works. Time had become a signature ? a cipher.

Thank you to Cécilia Becanovic,Vanessa Colombel, Clément Darasse, Muriel Ferraro, Ryan Gander, Gavin Nolan, Adam Prideaux, Roger Tomalty, Virginie Yassaf, Raphael Zarka, and everybody at Mains d'Oeuvres.

The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope was produced by Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers.

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Aurelien Froment
A Hole in the Life