Gasiorowski / De Dominicis / Lucariello / Bouillon

Opening June 28 2007 at 6pm

The Centre National d'Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson will present this summer four solo exhibitions by four artists who share a common strategy of questioning the foundations of art, notably painting, by using regressive practices – be they fictional or symbolic – in order to destabilize esthetic certitudes.

A man of painting and fiction, Gérard Gasiorowski (1930-1986), was especially good at throwing people off his tracks. His numerous series bear witness to a complex body of work which is marked by a constant undermining of the history of art. The exhibition is solely devoted to two projects initiated by the artist in 1975 and 1983: the Worosis Kiga Academy, an ossified and authoritarian art school headed by the Professor Arne Hammer; and Kiga, a discreet and wild Indian who incarnates painting and creation in its raw form. On the one hand academicism, and on the other, freedom.

Like the Machine which makes objects disappear, the Mirror which reflects everything except living beings, and While waiting for the circles formed by pebbles dropped in water to become squares, all of Gino De Dominicis (1947-1998) works constantly flirt with absurdity in order to better create meaning. The artist renders the eternal fleeting, or, on the contrary, immobilizes ephemeral instants in time. The graphic works presented here hark back to the mythic origin of art, an era in which writing and the first cosmogonies were invented. If the artist goes back to the source it is to better abstract himself from historical time in order to enter into that of the myth of eternity, an era when things were not yet conceivable. A time when it was still possible to be surprised, like the figure in the painting titled In the beginning was the image, dated 1981. This exhibition was curated by Laura Cherubini and Andrea Bellini, assisted by Norma Mangione.

The work of Saverio Lucariello (born in 1958) is built around a criticism of art discourse, plunging into the chasms of esthetic language. It is the figure of the artist which is questioned here, its postures and its demiurgic state. To do this the artist employs all possible media: painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound and performance. The exhibition at the Villa Arson brings together a series of recent paintings which make reference to a Golden Age – which is also grotesque – of painting, a primitive age peopled with barely living beings which carry, inhale, or “expulse” nameless soft forms. Sculptures which are similarly soft and formless echo these landscapes of “history before history”.

Finally, the fourth exhibition is devoted to Julien Bouillon (born in 1971). The artist has been working for several months on a series of paintings made using residual images from the history of painting, the scattered fragments of which are superimposed using a technique of successive layering. Wristwatches made from cow bones were made by the artist while the paintings were drying. The paintings were then photographed and these photographs were shown in place of the “originals”. The photographs/paintings are shown in voluntarily enclosed spaces, with the walls covered in lavender blue and the floors covered with anthracite carpet. The regressive and playful aspect of the work is evident. Not only does Julien Bouillon’s protocol allow him to return to the practice of painting in an almost primitive sense, without becoming imprisoned by it, but it also provides him with a way to question the process of the resurgence of images, their means of construction and the destiny to which they are subjected throughout time.

Eric Mangion Director, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson

Gerard Gasiorowski / Gino de Dominicis / Saverio Lucariello / Julien Bouillon
at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de la Villa Arson