TATIANA POZZO DI BORGO
2020

Tatiana Pozzo di Borgo, an artist living and working in Lacelle, Corrèze, presents her new suite of tonal paintings. She works through serial observation of objects, emptying them of their day to day associations and infusing them with a sense of loss and mourning. Her work explores the modern traditions that led to the rethinking of representation in painting while being oriented towards the social re-examination and restructuring of an artistic community.

The listless presence and hovering negativity of the small paintings evoke the ghosts of past grief who surface in apparitions of lost friends, social conditions, companion species, ecologies… Losses that accumulate in all lives and reveal a complex architecture of past pain dredged up by new crises. The paintings resemble a psychological platform for grief processes. Their Muddy greys and dusty silence offer a space out of joint with time.

Positioned to the right, but still the first picture you see, is a painting that looks as if it has been interrupted twice. Though at first it seems abstract, it begins to look like a portrait that was started but never finished, it is hazy and blurred. It was then placed on its side in its abandoned form, and the beginning of a new sketch laid over it and also abandoned. It is as if a ghost lingers here. What looks like abstraction in this canvas is in fact the not-yet, mingling with the once-was; a girl in a blue raincoat under a drawing of a bottle of water (perhaps?). It is this feeling of being in tension between two times, of being haunted by a past and a future, that marks Pozzo di Borgo’s work.

The exhibition unfolds through a series of paintings of egg boxes and eggs in their boxes, open but not all the same. The eggs and the spaces left by the eggs blend into each other. The brush marks tend to form a grid, replaying modernist gestures for revealing the image in its materiality. On the surface, these paintings could be an exercise in simplicity & restraint and an unembellished hope for finitude and quiet. However the stillness of the work is pregnant with questions that open geometrically forward rather than backwards, towards futures.

AANA LAAKKONEN
ouoùouille
2020


I write here to tell you, there… If you are around Treignac – that is in Corréze, that is in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, that is in France – between 27/6/2020 and 30/8/2020, you are warmly welcome to visit a lovely place on Earth that is called Treignac Projet. I have an exhibition t/here for the third time, more or less. We call it ouoùouille.

The exhibition is on the first floor (which I am used to thinking of as being the second). It is in a valley, where also a river finds its route. It is on a plateau, or rather “a shallow dome" pushed up by magma pressure that became a laccolith some time ago, so to speak. I go inside an oversized sweatshirt and start mounting the exhibition, but end up outside of it as the relation of this place and “the nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma” up there, got hotter – at least so I felt.

Three yellow-black hoverflies make something on my feet – kind of without permission. I do not know how and what the feet mean-matter for them. For some reason, I immediately come to think that my feet might stink (or something else that is not so appreciated by human people), and that might be why the tiny but not the tiniest persons happen to be interested. I smell my feet and judge them fresh. There is something in and on my feet that I do not understand. Neither do I compass where they think they are. I put the feet back down on the ground and the flies disappear. Maybe they like to stay higher up in the air.

There is an option to try to find out: to listen, to speak with, to read, to move along, to be in company of and to live-with those who know – in one way or another. That is risky, but is there any other way to become more tender,…or strict or.. well, what is needed for…

A long thick hair clutched by jute. An emptyish mug sinks into a mole hole. Water approaches an office that is a studio. A loud frog. Some spiders and webs – not sure if the amount is equal. The cotton reminds me of Frankenthaler and makes me feel awkward and wanting to be elsewhere. I remain to think the possible grounds for that. We figure some.

I am still often holding Barad’s and Haraway’s, feminist posthumanists’ texts in my hands…carrying them, reading them, getting comfort and in troubles with them…sometimes I rest my head on them and take a nap. When I lift my legs back onto a concrete fence the hover flies come back, and so on. This continues in a place that has offered a wonderful location and allowed situatedness to be acknowledged – even embraced – in artistic practices and lives. Though my view on this is very subjective-objective.

If you come for a visit you will meet a steep up-and-downhill, some thin and thicker cotton, wax, cinder blocks, acrylic ink, polyester, brackets, layers, cuts, weights, pulls, industrial weaves, holders, stairs, printed and cut paper, sounds of flowing water… …partly depending on the categories you are used to, and (on your conception of) where you are. In ouoùouille I continue ‘my’ recent years’ work with paint and feminist posthumanism – seeking to care for not-alONEness, situatedness and un~~~~~stable grounds.

Jaana Laakkonen lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Project kindly supported by Kone Foundation and Frame Contemporary Art Finland

CLÉMENT BOUDIN
2020

Clément Boudin returns to the field of still life painting to refigure it in relation to his experience of living and art-making in a rural and communal project in Lacelle, Corrèze. The decision to relocate his art practice to a marginal and labour-intensive environment has opened up an interest in reexamining the received traditions that inform our reading of painting.

The Dark Tools series depicts traditional, basic tools, nearly hovering, apparition-like, in an undefined and shadowy space. Without the dramatic effects of Chiaroscuro, or other historic tricks of painting, the depicted objects live in a gloom of forgotten users and tasks. The style and technical delivery of the small paintings is historical and naturalistic, but escapes in the last instance from being anachronistic, through a clever use of misframing that cuts across the supposed subject of the painting.

Drawing on the history of photography rather than painting, Clément Boudin puts the framing of the subject centrestage. The pleasure and self evidence of the image are spoiled by the displacement of the image. The bourgeois or colonial history of still life painting as it develops from the Dutch 17th-century still life, is disrupted in these paintings which, rather than falling prey to the naif desire to make a ”window onto the world”, finds itself centred on something other; something that will not rest or stay still; that can not be captured.

Boudin’s tools paintings are ‘ghostly signals’, evoking alienation and the phantasmatic way human labor reappears in commodities and surplus value or how spiritual beings can be thought of as collective representations. The gloom around the object; its disquiet and its unmourned histories is pressed into the frame and material of these little black paintings.

Accompanying the Dark Tools series is a series of paintings of hung gloves, which extends the references to past work, construction, and labours. This time, fully framed but still muddy and dark. Boudin does not often let the series dictate fully the program or interpretive framework of his works. There is humour in his selection of works; Beckettian and deathly, but funny nevertheless.

BENOÎT BRISSOT & LÉONARD SALLE
2020

Benoît Brissot and Léonard Salle have developed a hybrid practice that draws on the social and political possibilities of spatial transformation inherited from spontaneous group action. They are particularly interested in the flexibility of social stratification that can appear among marginal and low density populations. Throughout their personal and collaborative work they have fused different histories, from 1960s light projection to the growth of yeast cultures (CIAP Vassiviere). Their current installation, produced during a residency in the village of Treignac, uses the immersive traditions of 1980’s rave culture and its appropriation of marginal space, to critique art institutions’ capacities for colonisation and exclusion as well as proposing intersectional approaches for adapting specialist and caring practices.

BENJAMIN SWAIM
La soif de la mer
2020

Seascape.
A child lying on the floor, drawing or reading. The child’s thoughts are focused on the empty page, which is a reserve in the painting, an unpainted part. Solitude of the figure. It is in this solitude that the landscape appears.
The sea, the sky, the clouds:
the sea, a mighty body of water, deep, moving. A great wave breaking towards us that embraces us and threatens to drown us. Desire and terror.
The sky and the clouds: the light, the movement, the change of colours and shapes. Beauty beyond us, divine element.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Che cosa sono le nuvole?”, Iago and Othello, the two puppets, are thrown into an open-air garbage dump when they are no longer useful. Suddenly, now they are out of the theatre of passions, lies and self-deception, they see the clouds, the course of the clouds in the sky, beauty, pure beauty.
A little colour on the canvas to respond to this beauty, to quench my thirst, to save us from the sadness of grey overcoats.
Et un peu de jaune fluo sur mon gilet!

Benjamin Swaime
`

ANNA R JAPARIDZE
The Cabinet
2020

Like a whale-bone corset, like a world that never breathed.
Subdued beneath a fine veil of dust, the cabinet is a scene beyond its own appointment.
Perfectly still, the china lies unthought, delivered from carnality, and only monumental.
Only for the occasional glance does it perform:
A solemn play of light, an affected bow, a sequence of rehearsed images.
Formality reigns, setting a place for ideal forms that — having never arrived — are never considered gone.
This formality signs a contractual release for the hurried, irregular mass of living to go on.
The cabinet conserves the role of a drab paragon,
called to testify upon the release of a tension for perfection.

Anna Japaridze

LIAM SPROD
The Hierophany of Stones
2019


“It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone, apparently (or more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transformed into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience, all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.”
– Micrea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. p. 12.

The stones of an iron-age burial ground in weak midwinter light; a tree trapped in ice; a crack opened in a cliff by streams of clay dislodged in summer storms; mountains disappearing into mist; the verticality of bare trees reaching for the sky; and rags, ruined, petrified and stained grey in grey by layers of dust… These are the places and moments captured by the photography of Liam Sprod. Places where our profane understanding of the world wears thin, where thought must release itself, let go and open up to something deeper, where darkness and the unknown gather, and where the gods creep forward making the world anew in their very presence.
Everything remains the same, everything has changed. The photograph mediates our relation to place: projecting from its inner blackness and painting the world with its dark obscurity. The gods mediate our relation to nature: the stone in no longer just a stone there for our exploitation and ruin, it is now a manifestation of the holy, carrying the force of poetry, re-ordering order itself, and silencing all movement. In that silence there is room for quiet contemplation, for looking deeper, thinking deeply, a gaze into the inner emptiness where gods dwell. Emptiness is openness and stillness, where a single breath encompasses the world, the taste of iron in blood, the bite of frost, the dark glimmer of a secret heart that beats throughout the cosmos.
Take that breath, feel that pulse. Here, on the path through the forest, the wind soughs high above you, the stones lie beneath, there is a time beyond us all, but here we must still draw breath.

Liam Sprod

LEWITT/LERISSE
Sol LeWitt et Chrystele Lerisse
2019

The exhibition LeWitt & Lerisse presents important drawings by Sol LeWitt alongside the contemporary photographs of Chrystèle Lerisse, an artist based in the remote landscape of rural France. Against the backdrop of political change, movement and the insecurity of our historical moment, the exhibition explores the use of systems by the two artists alongside the affective force of their work. The comparability of the two artists, separated by more than just generations and continents, is centred around the artists’ use of programs and series, which are considered as primary and take precedence over the objects and meanings they transmit. Beyond the mechanic simplicity of their programs, they code a deeply complex modelling of our historical world through its mood or ‘vibe’.1

LeWitt’s work is strongly influenced by the developments in information and communication theory of his time. He re-organised the relationship between the artist, the viewer and the artwork so that it could be understood as a process of communication and not simply the transmission of idea and meaning. Taking the idea of a social system as developed by Niklas Luhmann2, systems should be understood as a set of simplifications of the overwhelming chaotic data of our environment so that the transmission of information is possible. This sets up an opposition between system and environment; systems intersect with subsystems and there are differentiations of systems. Systems self-produce through communication - “Communication always communicates that it communicates”3 - and evolve and change to detoxify themselves in case of malfunction. This recursive structure allows for the emergence of ambient meanings embedded in the space of possibility of the system.

With the work of Chrystèle Lerisse, the relation that the system has with its environment (defined as that which it can not communicate with) emerges with force. A system resists elements that attempt to enter it from outside, especially if these elements threaten the internal integrity of the system. The visibility and ability to produce meaning is defined by the system that generates those meanings, but with Lerisse’s work, the new question of the border-space between an encroaching chaotic environment and a (destabilized) interiority is articulated. Lerisse points beyond the system to its possible transformation, its evolution and detoxification. Her series always promises more, their incomplete ghostly appearance code more than just environmental noise. The Border is between an inarticulate external space and the space of meaning; between environment and system. Hers is a lament, a cry not yet of words, already emerging from a new differentiation, a communication not yet comprehensible, but becoming.

1. Peli Grietzer, A Theory of Vibe, Glass bead Journal, 2017
2. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of society Vol1, Stanford UP, 2012
3. Following Jonathan Flatley’s proposal in his article, Art Machine, in Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Squares, Edited by Nicholas Baume, MIT Press,2001

HÉLÈNE BARIL
Night of the Hunter
2019

In this installation of new drawings and works on paper by Hélène Baril, a space of hostility opens up that lies somewhere between Dürer’s Melancholia 1 and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Her drawings reproduce the alienation and estrangement that haunt our daily experiences through her use of repeated motifs that occupy and explore negative affect against the normative expectations which attempt to diminish them.

The main image that Hélène utilizes is that of the car crash or a crash aftermath, which has been drained of its shock and emotion, and is being inhabited in some way. The drawings are littered with the twisted carcases of automobiles entwined with pastoral motifs and playing children, but each crash-event is different. Each image is not the repetition of a singular event, but a cascade of parallel scenarios and universes passing through a prism of re-written scenes that incessantly interrupt any attempt to organise them into a sequential narrative. It is not even clear if the accident in anyway ‘belongs’ to the characters who inhabit the drawing fragments.

In Hélène’s work, the car crash is an incident that defines and eradicates a moment, it cuts it from everything that precedes it, it ruptures any meaningful passage from A to B. Instead it sets up an island out of time into which the children and puppets can act out their parts. The crashes are not owned by anyone in the drawings; they are not your or my crash; rather there is a field or relation of crashing which precedes everything. From this damage-field emerge the relations and socialisations of the drawing’s characters.

Baril indicates, in the large banner-shaped drawing that finishes the exhibition, that the refusal of her characters to acknowledge or attempt to change their place within the ‘crash’ has a political dimension. She proposes delinquency as her prefered activism; to resist the cure, to act out and act-up. Her work plays out in a world that is quietly abnormal and weirdly restrained; where no one is quite themselves as the best strategy for modern life.

GILLIAN WHITELEY & GEOFF BRIGHT
The gathering…the chewing] Re-so[u]rceries and Re-sonations

exhibition 15 August - 13 September

Three micro-performances
Wednesday 13 August – Friday 15 August

GAËLLE LEENHARDT
Séquence Métamorphique
2019

Drawing on her extensive archive of photographs, Gaëlle Leenhardt’s exhibition sets out an ongoing history of intensity, from the dawn of the planet to the unfolding of the present and beyond. Leenhardt shifts our attention away from the physical matter of her installations towards their grouped interrelations. She unearths these relationships between the archaic material of geological and geographic forces, and the momentary encounters evoked in her photographs. Here she entwines the long timescales of geological transformation with the presumed instantaneous nature of the photograph; duration within the moment. With this encompassing gesture she is able to explore the features of the world. These features she indexes in her installations through a shifting of perspectives that foregrounds relations rather than trying to pin down the objects in themselves.

Her title refers to the series of transformations of geological rock through intense heat and pressure. These sequences can be made up of rocks that are visually very different that have been metamorphoses under various conditions but originate from the same base rock. Gaëlle Leenhardt reasons these groups of intensive transformation in parallel to her archived photographic traces, suggesting a continuity between the photographs and planetary timescales. She proposes a sort of ancient scene-setting that leads to the various depicted moments; a continuous series of quantum events that pass through the present, where we attempt to draw out their intra-related parts.

Leenhardt’s political tonality is derived from her ability to think through relations without needing to fix the object beforehand. This ‘primacy of the relational’ may seem surprising in face of the very weighted and present matter of her installations, but it is remarkable exactly in her ability to slip us out of the habitual understanding of the objects that appear in her work. Leenhardt’s ontology is constructed from the archi-matter of geology, the momentary outcrops of socio-political events, and the physical diagram she constructs with them. The past is always available in Leenhardt’s work, though buried deep in the passing moment, ready to crystallize and transform her materials into surprising forms and possibilities.

Gaëlle Leenhardt. Born 1987. Lives and works between France and Serbia.

FRANCIS VIOLETTE AVEC CHRISTIAN DEDIEU
Silence Paradoxal
2019

Silence Paradoxal is an installation and performance machine developed by Francis Violette over several iterations in parallel with his diagramatic painting practice. The title comes from Fermi’s Paradox, which asks why, given the overwhelming probability for the conditions of intelligent life to appear elsewhere in the universe, have we never found any evidence of communications from them? Though there are many explanations for this ‘silence’, the importance here is not to prove or disprove the existence of alien life, but to stay with the silence, and to explore contemporary life in the face of irresolution, complexity and unknowing. The installation interrogates the ‘deafness’ of the self image of Man as the intelligent, pinnacle of evolutionary life, and brings to the fore different possibilities for self understanding that underline symbiosis, resonance and lack as modes of reasoning.

The installation draws on the capability of household Televisions to tune in to relics of the Big Bang event that are present in Cosmic Background Radiation. These traces present themselves in the white noise and ‘snow’ of untuned television sets. Francis Violette has added an augmented satellite disc to his arrays of TV’s to complete this receptor which forms the basis for the performances made with the installation in collaboration with Christian Dedieu. The performed part of the installation consists of mimicking and tuning the sounds produced by the receptor in a feedback process that intuitively includes the life-frequencies of the performers. The installation references the outsider scientist as an agent between the specialist knowledge of advanced science and the lived knowledges of everyday life.

Merci à Alice Peinado et Jean-Luc Gautier

WAITING TO SPEAK
Matt Bryans, Cenk Dereli, Jean Gilbert, Emma Holmes, Charlotte Houette, Liz Murray, Anna Rowson, Francis Uprichard.
2018

An exhibition about ghosts, losses and futures. Waiting to Speak assembles together a host of damages, from architecture to ecology that linger in the moment. The exhibition defines a space where we might be able to hear other voices Speaking Out, if only we can open ourselves to their address.

“It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary of not, seems possible and thinkable and just; that does not recognize in its principal the respect for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are dead or not yet born.

In that the ghost becomes central to Derrida’s thought on the political, it also becomes vital to the philosophy of the future. In Spectres of Marx Derrida explicitly addresses the problem of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the declaration of the end of history, and the question of the future of Marxism, and it is this question that prompts the wider question of the possibility of the political in general, and raises the issues of the ghost.”

“…The conception of happiness, in other words, resonates irremediably with that of resurrection. It is just the same with the conception of the past, which makes history into its affair. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? Is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today? Don’t the women that we court have sisters who they do not recognize anymore? If so, then there is a secret protocol between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled lightly…”

With warm thanks to Liam Sprod for painting the walls black, and Sabrina Tarasoff for her essay, Ghost Stories of Almost Nobody, Mousse 63.

J. Derrida, Specters of Marx. p xviii. 2006.
Quoted in Nuclear Futurism Liam Sprod, Nuclear Futurism. p 46. 2012
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History. Thesis II

MICHA ZWEIFEL
Ineinander Und Nacheinander
2018

Micha Zweifel presents a new body of work consisting of large plaster reliefs and figurative sculptures. Using the interstitial time between travels to make this exhibition, Zweifel addresses the situations of work for and in the current moment. The sculptures in the show reflect the passing of time in the work process as motif and spatial strategy. Time here is of an almost physical texture: major interruptions and boredom exist within each other, both past and anticipated. The plaster reliefs are worked in the negative by continuously reusing the same clay mould which is formed, colored and then cast in plaster. In this iterative process of approximation, recognition and abstraction, the motifs disintegrate into vivid textural surfaces.

kindly sponcered by funded by Rotterdam

GREY CURTAIN
Ida Applebroog, Liam Sprod, Linda Reif, Chrystèle Lerisse, Laura Põld, Andreas Waldén
2018

“Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent.” Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2009.

A Hole in the Grey Curtain presents six artists in a context that refuses the medicalised and individualizing conception of negative feelings in favour of one that is politicised and critical. The exhibition, acknowledges the changing environment of mounting stresses that condition everyday life, stresses that reveal themselves in psychological distress, hopelessness and diagnosable conditions that affect more and more people every year. What emerges is a notion of space haunted by unfulfilled utopian promises, concealed ideological barriers and the empty grid of abstract space. A space of simulation that mediates between sensibility and intellect; a melancholic counter-mood to provoke a hitherto unarticulated sense of commonality.

“We must convert widespread mental health problems from medicalised conditions into effective antagonisms. Affective disorders are forms of captured discontent.” Mark FIsher, Capital Realism, 2009.

“In the 1960’s and 1970’s, radical theory and politics coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural but a political category. But what we need now is a politisization of much more common disorders” Ibid

“What melancholizing produces…is knowledge of the historical origins of their melancholias” Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping, Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, 2008

“The kind of aesthetic practice I am concerned with here, however, is quite particular in its relation to melancholic moods. It is neither cathartic, compensatory nor redemptive… One must be self-consciously alienated from one’s emotional life for it to become historical datum…. My own emotional life must appear unfamiliar, not-mine, at least for a moment, if I am to see its relation to a historical context” Ibid

“As such, melancholia forms the site in which the social origins of our emotional lives can be mapped out and from which we can see the other persons who share our losses and are subject to the same social forces” Ibid

Benjamin’s counterintuitive contention is that it is precisely by dwelling on loss, the past, and political failures (as opposed to images of a better future) that one may avoid a depressing and cynical relation to the present. Ibid Pg 65

There is for Benjamin a definite resonance between our own personal past and a historical, collective past. The past is never solely our own anyway: “what has been forgotten… is never something purely individual,” Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s early Reflections on Theatre and Language 2013

“Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless uncertain and changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.” (W. Benjamin Franz Kafka 810) “The collapse of sequentiality and narrative leads to a spatial simultaneity that is, again, a response to their loss or, more accurately, to the loss of hope in linearity’s capacity to contain salvation and, in essence, to promise any type of closure.”

“This scattering of the continuum’s elements, their dispersal in space - their spatialization - is the response to the loss of eschatology, a response that embraces loss as an internal and eternal trace of what can no longer be recuperated.”

“The understanding of loss as a condition of possibility appears in the Tauerspiel book in yet another image: that of emptiness. Freud’s claim that the mourner sees the world as empty after experiencing the loss of a love-object is echoed in Benjamin’s discussion of the baroque religious backdrop, as well we the Tauerspiel itself.” Ilit Ferber, Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s early Reflections on Theatre and Language 2013

If the major tactic constitutive of systems of cognitive oppression has been the progressive individualisation of the populace, then the major form of resistance must be the pursuit of cognitive liberation through progressive collectivisation. We must work out how to pool our cognitive resources so as to use them more efficiently together, and through that find forms of individual freedom that are orthogonal to the proliferation of consumer choice https://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/ofta-cognitive-economics-and-the-functional-theory-of-stress/

L'exposition est rendue possible par les prêts de le centre des livres d'artistes (cdla), Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche.


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