Hervé Heuzé, Landscapes: Recent paintings – Galerie Richard

 

Hervé Heuzé painted portraits for several years. One day, one of his collectors visited his studio and asked him to paint a… landscape. The artist thought about it and agreed with one condition: that no human figure be depicted. Hervé Heuzé began to reflect on today’s notion of landscapes. Would he  let himself be swallowed up by  the path  laid out by  the media and delve into the cityscapes of suburban public housing, so as to give a respectable “social” and “fashionable” veneer. ? To think thus, would be to not know Hervé Heuzé. 

Instead, we have majestic landscapes of mountaintops. At first glance, the white snow, the jutting boulders, the purity of a blue sky demonstrate striking realism. The space is enormous, and you sense how tiny human beings are in such a place, even when they aren’t present. It makes you think of the great American landscape artists, and you almost hear an echo of their epic inspiration. We say “almost” because Hervé Heuzé, like any viewer, is well aware  that  these are not virgin  territories. These massive peaks were conquered  long ago, and  they are  the daily domain of hikers, skier, amateur paragliders, and other mountaintop sports. And yet, in our imagination, these landscapes are still connected to the ideas of adventure and purity. These are the landscapes of our fantasies.

Gradually, the viewer gets an inkling that these are imaginary landscapes inspired by landscape photos of the Alps. Thus, these mountains are represented in a frontal view, like his portraits, without changing perspectives, centered between a view of the sky above and a view of the ground below. The daring way he paints the sky and the clouds is a testament to the pleasure the creator derives from painting. These paintings emit sensuality. The snow is depicted with such smoothness that it needs not envy Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of pastries and scenes. These landscape paintings repeat the formal elements of his portraits: the solid figures in the sky and this lack of substance, the gentleness of the strokes, the brilliance of the colors, the neutrality of a “photograph”.

In the new most recent paintings Hervé Heuzé represent glaciers. A neutral blue sky and these chaotic forms which look abstract let people think of a computer generated painting which it is not. Hervé Heuzé makes reality as confusing as virttuality.

If David Hockney represents the paradigm of the American landscape by painting the Grand Canyon, Hervé Heuzé has used this series of Alpine landscapes to show us the fantastical archetype of the European landscape.

HERVE HEUZE, Landscapes
Paysages. Peintures récentes
June 14 - August 30, 2003

Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard
51-53, rue Saint-Louis en l’Ile  
75004 PARIS

 

Previous exhibitions at this gallery of contemporary art

Paul Henry RAMIREZ, Elevatious Transcendsualistic, April 26 - June 7, 2003

YEK, Glare, March 8 - April 23, 2003

Risa SATO, Risa Campaign, February 1 - February 26, 2003

 

Next exhibitions at this gallery

Carl FUDGE, September 6 - October 14, 2003

Adam ROSS, The City at Night Dreaming of Itself, October 18 - November 18, 2003

Stefan HOENERLOH, Cities made in Magrathea, November 22, 2003 - January 13, 2004

Olaf RAUH, Playgrounds, January 17 - February 17, 2004

Beverly FISHMAN, Ecstasy, February 21 - April 6, 2004

.

Biographie de Léonard de Vinci par Serge Bramly

Livres sur l’art > Biographie

 

 

JC Lattès réédite le livre de Serge Bramly publié en 1995 sur Léonard de Vinci. Ce livre a en effet connu un beau succès et à été largement traduit. Serge Bramly nous offre ici une biographie qui nous permet de mieux comprendre l'oeuvre de Léonard de Vinci mais aussi le contexte dans lequel il la réalisa. Dessinateur visionnaire, peintre et sculpteur, Léonard de Vinci cotoyait d'autres figures centrales de l'art de son époque tel que Botticelli ou Michel Ange. Serge Bramly nous éclaire là aussi sur les relations qu'entretenaient entre eux ces personnages qui aujourd'hui encore ne cessent de susciter l'admiration, avec la part de mystère qui les entoure. L'écriture de Serge Bramly, sa façon de d'aborder les hommes, les événements et les situations, le cadre historique, offre un éclairage très agréable à lire et très enrichissant.

  © Courtesy Jean-Claude Lattès

 

Serge Bramly
Léonard de Vinci. Biographie
Jean-Claude Lattès
mai 2003
488 pages - 240 x 155 mm
ISBN : 9782709616416
24,5 euros

Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting 

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City 

June 6 – August 31, 2003 

For more than fifty years, California artist Wayne Thiebaud has enjoyed a prodigious career. Highlighting the work of this profoundly influential and inventive painter of landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and portraits, the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting presents more than forty works from the past five decades. It also demonstrates Wayne Thiebaud’s contributions to American popular culture and art history

The exhibition has been drawn mainly from Thiebaud’s family collection along with works from Midwestern public and private collections. “This exhibition gives rare insight into what an artist decides to keep in his collection,” said exhibition curator Dana Self, curator of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition’s forty canvases include Thiebaud’s signature still lifes, portraits, cityscapes, and landscapes from the early 1950s to today. 

Wayne Thiebaud has painted bountiful arrangements since the 1960s. Renowned for his images of cakes, pies, gumballs, and other confections, Wayne Thiebaud also explores color, lighting, and arrangement of mass-produced, commercial objects, including shoes, toys, flowers, and cosmetics. His still-life paintings celebrate the shapes and colors of what most of us perceive as ordinary, like the playful stack of bow ties in "Bow Tie Tree" (1969) or the culinary delights in "Cakes & Pies" (1994–95). Wayne Thiebaud experiments with his arrangements. Sometimes he makes one object monumental, and at other times, he places dozens of items in orderly rows.

Since the early 1970s, the rolling streets of San Francisco and its surrounding communities have captured Wayne Thiebaud’s attention. He has translated them into dynamic cityscapes, including "Intersection" (1973), one of his first cityscapes, and his recent "Valley Streets" (2003). Wayne Thiebaud exaggerates the steep hills and skyscrapers by featuring extreme perspectives of the city. This same exaggerated view is reiterated in Wayne Thiebaud’s fertile California landscapes. Visitors may study the plunging cliffs and sweeping landscapes of northern California in works such as "Heart Ridge" (1969) and "Green River Lands" (1998). 

Wayne Thiebaud also works with portraits like his contemporaries Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. He paints monumental portraits of family members and friends in settings where there no backgrounds and other forms of context. While the portraits are seemingly spare, viewers still find his dynamic palette of blues, yellows, reds, and pinks.

Wayne Thiebaud first began his career as a cartoonist and layout designer for Rexall Drug Company in the late 1940s. He began teaching in 1951 at Sacramento Junior College (now Sacramento City College). For nearly three decades, Thiebaud taught at the University of California, Davis, along with well-known California artists William Wiley, Manuel Neri, and Robert Arneson. Like his students, Wayne Thiebaud experiments. As a teacher and artist, Wayne Thiebaud draws influence from art history, including Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, French painters Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Edgar Degas, and American painter Edward Hopper. With more than fifty years of creativity, Thiebaud inspires future generations of artists. 

A catalogue for the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting features color plates of works in the exhibition as well as an interview with Wayne Thiebaud. 

KEMPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

www.kemperart.org

Cedric Christie at Rocket Gallery, London - 1/2 full or 1/2 empty?

Cedric Christie: 1/2 full or 1/2 empty? 

Rocket Gallery, London 

7 June - 9 August 2003

Jonathan Stephenson/Rocket presents new work by the London-based artist CEDRIC CHRITIE (b. 1962, UK).

Cedric Christie adresss the relation ships of form, colour and material in a serie of wall-mounted sculptures. Assembled from scaffolding pipes, spray-painted solid hues and installed at a diagonal, these pieces transform a mundane structural support into aesthetic objects which recall te colour experimentation and dynamism of early twentieth-century artistic precedents.

CEDRIC CHRISTIE lives and works in London. His previous solo shows include Rocket, London (2001), and Commercial Gallery, London (1995 & 1997).

Last autumn Cedric Christie's work featured in "Berlin/London/minimal", the Rocket exchange show at Galerie Markus Richter, Berlin. Other recent group shows have included "It's only words at Mirror", london College of printing; "It's only a game" at Object 57, Manchester; and "Cabinet with outfit" at Gallerie Andreas Brüning, Düsseldorf. In 2001 his work was included in the two-year long exhibition "Collection 5" at Courtauld Institute, London.

ROCKET GALLEY

13 Old Burlington Street, London W1S 3AJ

www.rocketgallery.com

Untitled video by Aïda Ruilova at CCS Bard, NY

Untitled by Aïda Ruilova

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York

June 30 - September 7, 2003

Aïda Ruilova's new video, Untitled, will be featured in its East coast premiere after an initial showing in the master's degree exhibition The Lengths, curated by Center graduate student Kelly Taxter, on view at the Museum from April 13 to 27, 2003.

Aïda Ruilova created Untitled during her residency at ArtPace in Texas and this is a recent acquisition by the Marieluise Hessel Collection on permanent loan to the Center for Curatorial Studies.

Aïda Ruilova creates short videos that exploit cinematic collage and editing that exploit cinematic collage and editing techniques to evoke psychological tensions. Focusing on the relationships among sound, image, and duration, she interlaces her strong interest in music with a gothic aesthetic inspired, in part, by camp and B-movie horror and vampire flicks of the 1970s.

Aïda Ruilova studied at the University of South Florida and the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work has recently been shown at the Impakt film festival in Utrecht, The Netherlands; the New Museum and P.S. 1 in New York City; and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium. She is also a member of the alternative music group Alva, which has released two CDs.

Other summer exhibitions at CCS:

Theory and Observation: New Work by Slater Bradley

Sodium Dreams, curated by Elizabeth Fisher