Georges Rousse, Robert Mann Gallery, NYC

Georges Rousse
Robert Mann Gallery, New York
May 2 - June 29, 2002

Robert Mann Gallery presents 'Georges Rousse', an exhibition of photographs.

Georges Rousse was born in Paris in 1947. With formal training in architecture and advertising, Georges Rousse began to work with installation art and photography in the 1970s. Over the past thirty years, he has produced an extensive body of work that fuses photography, painting and architecture into one challenging aesthetic discipline.

Georges Rousse works in buildings either derelict or scheduled for renovation throughout Europe, Korea, Japan, Canada and the United States. The facades and interiors of these structures serve as temporary, nomadic studios and are the creative locus for his artwork. As Georges Rousse paints, adds structures, or cuts away walls, vibrant shapes and meditative patterns emerge from the barren environment. These masterful executions of trompe l'oeil coalesce from a single vantage point, captured by Georges Rousse's camera. The spatial intervention of Georges Rousse in these buildings transforms and comments on the existing architecture.

In the first of two new bodies of work, Georges Rousse incorporates complex topographical maps in place of his more frequent use of geometrical shapes. Inspired by hiking excursions through Nepal, Georges Rousse places these maps into unlikely spaces, delineating the disparity between urban and rural environments. The delicate looping of elevation lines on the maps evokes the physical and emotional memory of traversing the landscape : its valleys, peaks, roads and rivers.

The second of these two new series of images employs gestural abstractions, more whimsical but no less demanding than Georges Rousse's other optical puzzles. The painstaking application of paint to walls, staircases and other architectural details is transformed by the camera lens into a canvas of spontaneous brushstrokes that seems to hover above the surface of the photograph.

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
210 Eleventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001
www.robertmann.com