LA PENSEE SAUVAGE

LPS (V.t) La pensée sauvage (Viola tricolor) is a wild plant common in most of Europe. The plant is especially sort after for the delicacy of it’s flower. It is related to (la pensée cultivée).

The artists in this exposition consecrate their work through distortion and falsification: indications of other worldliness, another language, unknown rituals etc. In his exposition at the Store Gallery in London last year, Matthew Smith presented a series of duvet sculptural forms that resemble abstract figures on wooden structures. George Henry Longly presented in the g39 Gallery in Cardiff a pole that seems to escape from the ground indicates a dreamlike environment that is forced into a white, cubic gallery space. In his multiple productions, Genet Mayors is fascinated by cryptozoology, in other words the study of animals that are still unknown to science: Loc Ness, Big Foot, Yeti, etc. Mayor presents a giant head of Sasquatch, an animal in the North American folklore whose actual representation is still being debated today by different “witnesses” accounts. Parallel to this work in cryptozoology, Genet Mayor creates sculptures that oscillate between surrealism, hypnotic abstraction, and evoke, in pictorial sense, of strange instruments that vaguely resemble assemblage items found in common home & garden shops. Dominique Ghesquière shares the taste for disinclination in association and measured actions: a magazine seems strangely voluminous once she sets out to crumble each page of the magazine. Is it a manifestation of painstalking labor or an expression of a nervous gesture? Her works seems to derive from found objects and/or the apparent of found objects. Aloïs Godinat presents a sculpture made out of small paperback novels in which the colors on the edge of the papers from the books interpenetrate evenly in intervals tantamount as a monument to the hybridization of narratives. Another work consists of a small bell placed on a shelf. The questions arise immediately to spectators: can one play with the object? Will it ring? What will happen? The function of this object is associated with very simple gestures. By putting it on the shelf, the bell is a perfect emblem of indefinition. Numerous works by George Henry Longly deals with systems, combinations, codes, etc. There is an abundance of construction play, of bulbs of colors and with titles like “ I don’t know why” or “ The proposal to replace section numbers with letters was accepted” etc. If there is a polysemy among this group of artists, it is manifests through their interpretative habits. By creating a reflective observatory, their gestures return to simple or modest means to find a paradoxical expressive dimension. Could it be an expressive minimalism?

Julien Fronsacq

LA PENSEE SAUVAGE
Kuratoren: Julien Fronsacq, Philippe Valentin

mit Dominique Ghesquiere, Alois Godinat, George Henry Longly, Genet Mayor, Matthew Smith