Lenz @ Galerie Barthelemy Bouscayrol, Biarritz - Histoire déposée

LENZ, Histoire déposée
Galerie Barthelemy Bouscayrol, Biarritz
18 mai - 17 juin 2018

LENZ, Histoire déposée, 2018

L’artiste LENZ (né en 1978), référence du graffiti français depuis plus de 20 ans, dévoile sa nouvelle exposition à la Galerie Barthelemy Bouscayrol de Biarritz. L’artiste présente un ensemble d’oeuvres inédites, centré sur notre culture de masse étudiée dès 1960 par Roy Lichtenstein.

LENZ poursuit depuis 20 ans une démarche créatrice revisitant les icônes de la culture populaire, sans renier les codes du graffiti. Incontournable de la consommation de masse, quoi de plus approprié que le LEGO® pour traduire avec poésie les éléments d’un passé tant convoité ?

« La brique a tout du graffiti : ...une capacité de création illimitée ». 

LENZ, Histoire déposée, 2018

Brouillant les représentations, la brique LEGO® décompose l’oeuvre en pixel, sollicitant notre pleine attention pour saisir la subtilité du support et nous questionner sur le sens de ce que l’on nous propose. L’artiste bouscule ainsi les codes et porte au rang d’icône les objets et tendances issus d’une consommation jetable.

LENZ, présente aujourd’hui l’exposition « Histoire Déposée », une série d’oeuvres inédites centrée sur l’initiateur du Pop Art : Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997). Pétri de culture populaire, ce mouvement des années 60, marque un tournant dans la création contemporaine et la culture de masse. 

En s’attardant sur le caractère esthétique des éléments, LENZ rétablit le lien entre le spectateur et sa propre culture, apportant un regard nouveau sur l’histoire de l’art comme sur le graffiti, source inépuisable de création.

GALERIE BARTHELEMY BOUSCAYROL
2 Av. de la Reine Victoria, Biarritz
www.galerie-barthelemy-bouscayrol.com

Dan Graham @ Greene Naftali, New York - A New Look at TV and a Funhouse

Dan Graham

A New Look at TV and a Funhouse

Greene Naftali, New York

May 19 – June 16, 2018

Over the past fifty years, Dan Graham has continually reexamined the intersections of architecture and popular culture. Dan Graham’s new installation, TV Producer as Conceptual Artist (2018), combines these interests, displaying excerpted footage from reality and game shows on box monitors, around an architectural screen of perforated Masonite and stretched Mylar. Visitors are invited to lounge on vinyl cushions spread across the floor for easy viewing, evoking a Middle American suburban den. Hand painted in a neo-‘60s mode on the exterior window is the work’s title, a collaboration with designer Michael Metz.

The selected clips combine pathos and humor, demonstrating TV’s ability to generate amusement from the small and large humiliations of its subjects. An American Family, which was the topic of a 1983 essay by the artist, purports to document the daily lives of an ordinary Santa Barbara family, the Louds—but, paradoxically, their appearance on TV propelled them into sudden celebrity, at least for a Warholian fifteen minutes. In Queen for a Day, overburdened housewives compete for the sympathy of a live audience, gauged by an applause meter. The Newlywed Game reveals how little recently married couples actually know each other, sometimes provoking genuine marital discord. This Is Your Life forces celebrities to confront their pasts, and Candid Camera stages pranks and records the bewildered responses.

The large format print hanging in the front gallery refers to Dan Graham’s historical manipulations of television as medium, collecting images and text related to his 1976 conceptual work Production / reception (piece for two cable TV channels). In that work, the inside of a TV studio is filmed and then broadcast on TV. On another channel, a family is shown sitting around the TV set, watching. The artist thus inverts the standard flow of televised distribution, turning the production process itself, as well as the experience of spectatorship, into possible “channels” to be viewed.

In the central gallery, Dancing Circles (2018), a site-specific installation of interlocking glass and steel, is set in conversation with the structural columns that divide the room. The installation continues Dan Graham’s use of reflective material to produce funhouse-like optical effects that are disorienting in their visual distortions. Dan Graham’s ongoing series of sculptural installations, often called “pavilions,” adopt the conventions of corporate architecture, employing the two-way mirror glass used in office buildings to allow light in while keeping prying eyes out.

On view in the back gallery are two sculptures. One, a pyramidal model using a combination of two-way mirror glass and perforated steel, if built full-scale and entered would create an almost psychedelic experience. The second model, for a pavilion whose entrance riffs on the “moon gates” found in Chinese gardens, has been realized at full-scale in Vienna and Milwaukee. A divider made from laminated glass separates the two works—objects present on the reverse side of the glass are almost, but not quite, visible.

DAN GRAHAM lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2017); Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2017); Greene Naftali, New York (2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2014); Le Consortium, Dijon (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009); and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009) His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tate Collection, London; Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne, Paris; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

GREENE NAFTALI

508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.greenenaftaligallery.com

Saul Leiter @ Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYC + Book In My Room, published by Steidl

Saul Leiter: In My Room

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

May 10 - June 30, 2018

Saul Leiter’s intimate photographs of his muses over three decades is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery. Deeply personal and contemplative, many of the images in Saul Leiter: In My Room share tender moments underscored by the subjects’ trust in the photographer. 

SAUL LEITER

In My Room, Steidl, 2018

The exhibition, which includes work from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s, is the subject of a book, also titled In My Room, published by Steidl. 

Many of the 35 photographs in the exhibition are on public view for the first time. 

Fed by thrilling recent discoveries from Saul Leiter’s archive, the exhibition reveals the world of the artist and the women in his life through his studies of the female figure. Often illuminated by the lush natural light of Saul Leiter’s studio in New York City’s East Village, these black-and-white images uncover the mutual and empathetic collaboration between the artist and his subjects.

In the 1970s, Saul Leiter planned to make a book of his nudes, but never realized the project in his lifetime. The exhibition and upcoming book offer a first-time look at this body of work, which Leiter began on his arrival in New York in 1946 and continued throughout the next two decades. Leiter, who was also a painter, incorporates abstract elements into these photographs and often shows the influence of his favorite artists, including Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse.

The prolific Saul Leiter, who painted and took pictures fervently up to his death, worked in relative obscurity well into his eighties. Saul Leiter preferred solitude in life, and resisted any type of explanation or analysis of his work. With In My Room, he ushers viewers into his private world while retaining his strong sense of mystery.

Saul Leiter made an enormous and unique contribution to photography with a highly prolific period in New York City in the 1940s and ’50s. His abstracted forms and radically innovative compositions have a painterly quality that stands out among the work of his New York School contemporaries.

SAUL LEITER (1923-2013) was born in Pittsburgh, the son of a rabbi who was a distinguished Talmudic scholar. In 1946, he moved to New York City to pursue his painting. Shortly after his arrival in New York he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart, and soon after with W. Eugene Smith, and the photography exhibitions he saw in New York, particularly Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, inspired his growing interest in photography.

Edward Steichen included Saul Leiter’s black-and-white photographs in the exhibition Always the Young Strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Saul Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Saul Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova.

In the early 1980s Saul Leiter was faced with financial difficulties that forced the closure of his Fifth Avenue commercial studio. For the next two decades he lived and worked almost in obscurity. In 2006, with the help of writer/curator Martin Harrison and Howard Greenberg Gallery, the groundbreaking monograph Saul Leiter: Early Color was published by Steidl in Germany. The “little” book became an overnight sensation with worldwide distribution and firmly established Leiter as an early pioneer in the history of color photography. In 2006, the Milwaukee Museum of Art held the first US museum show of Saul Leiter’s photographs.

Saul Leiter’s work has been prominently featured in solo museum and gallery shows in the U.S. and Europe. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the National Gallery of Australia; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

About the Saul Leiter Foundation

The Saul Leiter Foundation, founded in 2014, is dedicated to preserving the art and legacy of the American photographer and painter Saul Leiter, and to the appreciation, advancement, and conservation of photographic works worldwide. The foundation maintains an archive of Saul Leiter’s artwork and operates activities to promote the medium of photography through educational programs, exhibitions, books, and licensing. The SLF is working toward completing a catalogue raisonné to be made available for study by students, curators, writers, and art professionals. For more information, visit saulleiterfoundation.org. 

HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY

41 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022

www.howardgreenberg.com

Thomas Gainsborough @ The Morgan Library & Museum, New York - Experiments in Drawing

Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
May 11 - August 19, 2018

Renowned for his portraiture and depictions of rural landscapes, the eighteenth-century British artist Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) is best known as a painter. However, he was also a draftsman of rare ability who extended the traditional boundaries of drawing technique, inspiring an entire generation of British artists such as John Constable (1776–1837) and J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851).

The Morgan Library & Museum presents an exhibition solely focused on Thomas Gainsborough’s works on paper, bringing together twenty-two outstanding examples in graphite, chalk, oil paint, and other media. Included in the show are preparatory studies, finished works, and exercises made for the artist’s own enjoyment.

“As with many artists, Thomas Gainsborough used the medium of drawing to experiment and explore,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Famous in his day for his paintings of members of the British aristocracy and gentry, he eagerly turned to drawing as a respite from his portrait work. It allowed him the freedom to pursue his passion for rendering nature and scenes of country life utilizing new stylistic effects in color, line, and material. The Morgan is pleased to present its first exhibition on this important aspect of Gainsborough’s art.”

The Career of a Portrait Painter

Thomas Gainsborough trained in London, where he displayed an innate talent for drawing and painting. The artist’s earliest figure drawing, A Boy with a Book and a Spade (1748), served as a study for the signboard of a village school. Minor commissions such as this were a primary source of income for a novice painter like Gainsborough as he tried to establish his career.

In Bath, where he moved in 1759, Gainsborough emerged as the era’s most fashionable and successful portraitist. There he became fascinated with the effects of light on fabric, often using black chalk to explore different tonal solutions. His renderings of sitters’ expressions and the rich texture of their clothing led to his reputation as the Anthony van Dyck of his time.

Thomas Gainsborough would later create figure studies with models in different poses, using inventive techniques intended to capture the viewers’ eye in an instant. In Lady Walking in a Garden (ca. 1785, see page 1), the woman’s translucent silk dress is a technical tour de force: the artist superimposed fine veils of white and yellow chalk, applied both wet and dry, imitating the feathery brushstrokes that characterize his paintings.

Despite his commercial success as a figure painter, later in life Thomas Gainsborough wanted to escape from what had become for him the routine of portraiture and business life. “I am sick of Portraits” he complained in a letter to a friend, “and I wish very much to. . . walk off to some sweet village where I can . . . enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.”

A Passion for Creating Landscapes

Thomas Gainsborough would come to devote much of his time to creating landscapes of his own invention on paper. Laying out stones, branches, leaves, and soil of various colors on his worktable, he assembled and drew landscapes in his studio.

In his quest for original effects, the artist often looked to rugged terrain, contrasts of light and shade, and the nuances of shadow resulting from the changing seasons. He explored the rolling topography of natural settings and gothic, shadowy atmospheres in his early years. They offered him almost limitless compositional possibilities as he simultaneously conducted his technical experiments: for instance, he immersed his paper in milk and varnished it to give his landscape drawings a transparent tint.

In the mid-1770s, Thomas Gainsborough increasingly experimented with drawing by mixing different media and applying varnish to surfaces to produce landscapes that mimicked the visual effects of oil paintings. In the following decade, he would go on to produce variations of similar compositions drawn mainly in black and white chalk: serpentine, asymmetrical landscapes with moving skies, windswept trees, solitary animals, and scenes of agrarian life.

Thomas Gainsborough also embraced printmaking. By combining different etching techniques, he produced prints in imitation of his drawings, replicating on the surface of the copper plate the same variety of textural and tonal effects that characterize his chalk drawings. He turned to aquatint to evoke the transparency of the sky and water, as seen in Wooded Landscape with Cows beside a Pool (1755-1780), a rare print from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Toward the end of his career, he began favoring concepts rather than depicting a realistic view. In Figures in a Wooded Landscape, (1785–88), trees, animals and rocks lose their shape, and parts of the landscape veer toward pure abstraction.

Thomas Gainsborough’s experiments subverted the academic conventions of drawing—by combining techniques and materials, he called into question the distinction between drawing and painting. His technical achievements became a paradigm for British art for the whole of the eighteenth century, and his later works in particular influenced the near abstract compositions of the next generation of British artists. Always in fierce pursuit of the “new” in drawing, Gainsborough lamented on his deathbed that he was “to leave life just as he was beginning to do something with his art.”

Publication: The accompanying catalogue, Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing, features full-page reproductions of seventeen works in the exhibition, a foreword by director Colin B. Bailey, and essays by Moore Curatorial Fellow Marco Simone Bolzoni and conservator Reba F. Snyder.

Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing

Published by Paul Holberton Publishing

Written by Marco Simone Bolzoni, Moore Curatorial Fellow 

at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 

and with a contribution by Reba F. Snyder, Paper Conservator 

at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 

this catalogue contains a substantial introductory essay, 

a discussion of Gainsborough’s techniques and media, 

and entries on the drawings

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405
themorgan.org

FAILE @ MAMCS, Strasbourg - From the Air We Share

FAILE, From the Air We Share

Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg - MAMCS

5 mai 2018 - 26 mai 2019

A l'occasion de ses 20 ans, le MAMCS a lancé une invitation originale au collectif FAILE, duo d'artistes installé à Brooklyn (USA) : investir les façades du musée. Leur création artistique offre ainsi à tous les visiteurs et passants une vaste et unique fresque de 1000 m2 aux influences croisées, de l'art de l'ornement au pop art en passant par la recherche typographique et l'influence des fanzines et des comic strips américains.

Duo internationalement reconnu, FAILE se compose de Patrick McNeil (né en 1975 à Edmonto, Canada) et de Patrick Miller (né en 1976 à Minneapolis, Etats-Unis). Amis d'enfance, Miller et McNey conçoivent ensemble sous le nom de FAILE, sérigraphies et collages. Le nom de leur duo "FAILE" est un anagramme du titre de leur première oeuvre collective, A Life. Ce sont leurs interventions monumentales dans l’espace public qui contribuent à leur reconnaissance : la Tate Modern à Londres en 2008, la Place des Restauradores à Lisbonne en 2010, le New York City Ballet en 2013 ou encore Times Square à New York en 2015. Epris de mots et d’images issues aussi bien de l’Histoire de l’Art que de la culture pop (cinéma, bande dessinée, publicité), FAILE réalise de vastes peintures murales et des installations dans l’espace urbain, leur champ d’action allant au-delà du seul Street Art. 

Première invitation française de cette ampleur pour FAILE, le projet du MAMCS vient magnifier le bâtiment du musée conçu par Adrien Fainsilber en 1998. Pour le musée, FAILE imagine une série de nouvelles compositions qui prend ses sources dans leur rencontre avec la ville. En décembre 2017, Patrick Miller et Patrick McNeil découvrent Strasbourg pour la première fois et observent avec attention et fascination le patrimoine, l’histoire et les légendes qui forgent l’identité d’une cité qui leur est complètement inconnue. De retour à Brooklyn, ils reprennent les images et souvenirs qui ont jalonné leur séjour pour écrire un poème qui sert de trame à leur projet. Intitulé From the Air We Share, ce poème dominé par la métaphore et le symbole, constitue la trame d’un récit épique, dans lequel apparaissent en filigrane des figures liées à l’histoire et à la culture strasbourgeoises, de Marie-Antoinette à Hans Arp, de la présence du Rhin à celle du diable qui hante la cathédrale.

Outre l’ensemble de fresques réalisées pour les murs du musée, une sélection d’oeuvres de FAILE

sera présentée dans l’une des salles du MAMCS. OEuvres sur bois, sérigraphies et acryliques sur

toile mettant en scène plusieurs de leurs personnages et motifs-fétiches seront ainsi visibles sur la mezzanine de l’espace d’« ExpériMAMCS ! » (au rez-de-chaussée, en bout de nef).

Ce projet a été mené en partenariat avec la Galerie Danisz qui représente FAILE.

L'exposition est organisée dans le cadre de "Happy 20", programme de manifestations de la Ville de Strasbourg, à l'occasion des 20 ans du Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Starsbourg, célébrés en 2018.

Commissaire : Estelle Pietrzyk, conservatrice en chef du patrimoine, Directrice du MAMCS

MAMCS - MUSEE D'ART MODERNE ET CONTEMPORAIN DE STRASBOURG

1 Place Hans-Jean-Arp, Strasbourg

www.musees.strasbourg.eu

Jane Hammond @ Lyndsey Ingram, London - Natural Selection: New Botanical Collages

Jane Hammond

Natural Selection: New Botanical Collages

Lyndsey Ingram, London

10 May - 15 June 2018

Lyndsey Ingram presents the first London solo show of botanical collages by American artist, JANE HAMMOND (b. 1950), who combines printmaking techniques with painting, photography, found objects and digital elements to create one-of-a-kind large-scale collages that explore the infinite complexity of the natural and man-made worlds.

Timed to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show and the Chelsea Fringe Festival, this exhibition of new work showcases Jane Hammond’s modern and disruptive approach to the historic tradition of botanical prints and the science of horticulture. Instead of seeking to record and classify plants, the artist creates imaginary tableaux: ‘Everything I make is a cocktail of fact and fiction – of things found out in the world, things I invent, and hybrids of the two.’

Some of Jane Hammond’s botanical collages contain specific themes. For example, in one piece, all of the plants are poisonous. Another features all of the stages of the Monarch butterfly and its food supply. All of the works contain imaginative attitudes toward colour, scale, form, and botany itself. ‘In the end, I’m looking for a bold unity that is built upon dissociation and tension, as well as harmony.’

Originally trained as a sculptor and ceramist, Jane Hammond has evolved her own technique of making these collages, first creating an elaborate collage for the ground itself, often with Japanese papers. Then the artist begins to arrange botanical elements already printed or drawn, painted and painstakingly cut out. She continues arranging, re-arranging, and swapping until the piece unifies. Then all the elements are glued exactly in place and pressed flat under blotters and stacks of books from her library.

‘I don’t like the uniformity of surface in traditional printmaking. I want something fresher, more varied and multi-lingual.’ Each collage combines handmade and digital imagery – linoleum blocks that are hand-carved, hand-printed and later hand-coloured, with photographs the artist has taken, in markets, gardens and flower shops – as well as found images drawn from the the world of colouring books, vintage handkerchiefs, wallpaper and textiles. While collage, printmaking and photography are separate media, for Hammond, all of them are inextricably bound together in her work and are essential to her vision of art: ‘I have an encyclopedic mind that scavenges for information and imagery, wherever I can find it.’

Jane Hammond is a passionate botanist and gained her love of plants at the side of her grandmother, who was an ambitious amateur gardener. ‘When I was six she made me memorise the Latin names of a hundred flowers.’

‘I entered the art world in the heydey of Minimalism – the era when less was more and flowers were verboten. It has taken me a long time to embrace and include this life-long interest in my practice. Looking closely at plants and birds one gains an understanding of taxonomic relationships and of the incredible complexity and variety of nature. My work embraces the fact that more is more – the infinite complexity of nature and our ability to make distinctions and associations in its contemplation – is a cause for celebration and an important part of what makes us human.’

Jane Hammond’s work is represented in the collections of major US museums, including MoMA, New York; the Albright-Knox Museum, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum, the Corcoran Museum, Washington DC; de Young Museum, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is also in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museo d’Arte Contemporaria, Mexico City.

LYNDSEY INGRAM

20 Bourdon Street, London W1K 3PL

www.lyndseyingram.com

____________

Regards photographiques sur le Petit Palais @ Petit Palais, Paris - L'esprit des lieux

L’esprit des lieux. Regards photographiques sur le Petit Palais
Petit Palais, Paris
3 mai – 8 juillet 2018

Vasco Ascolini, Jean-Christophe Ballot, Stéphane Couturier, Bruno Delamain, Flore, Hélène Langlois, 
Julien Lescoeur

Le Petit Palais présente en entrée libre la première exposition dédiée à son jeune fonds photographique. Le parcours se compose de sept photographes, sept personnalités séduites par l’esprit des lieux : Vasco Ascolini, Jean-Christophe Ballot, Stéphane Couturier, Bruno Delamain, Flore, Hélène Langlois, Julien Lescoeur. Une centaine de photographies contemporaines acquises ces dix dernières années, portant un regard particulier sur le musée lui-même, sont exposées.

Comme dans beaucoup d’institutions anciennes, la photographie est d’abord entrée au Petit Palais comme document. C’est au début des années 1990 qu’elle accède au rang d’objet de collection à la faveur de la redécouverte et de la restauration d’un ensemble exceptionnel de daguerréotypes. L’intérêt pour le médium motive dès lors acquisitions et commandes. Des achats de photographies anciennes sont centrés sur l’Exposition Universelle de 1900 et des portraits de personnalités liées aux collections : le marchand Ambroise Vollard, la comédienne Sarah Bernhardt et bien sûr des artistes…. En 2016, l’exposition Dans l’Atelier. L’artiste photographié d’Ingres à Jeff Koons a permis de montrer les meilleures d’entre-elles.

La photographie contemporaine n’est pas pour autant délaissée. Comme de nombreuses institutions en chantier à la même époque (le Louvre, le Grand Palais…), le Petit Palais ouvre ses portes – et ses entrailles – aux photographes à l’occasion de sa rénovation opérée de 2000 à 2005. Témoins privilégiés, Flore, Bruno Delamain, Hélène Langlois et Stéphane Couturier observent et suivent de l’intérieur les mutations profondes que vit le musée. À sa réouverture, les photographes ont conquis leur place. D’autres artistes leur emboîtent alors le pas : Julien Lescoeur, Jean-Christophe Ballot et Vasco Ascolini sillonnent le Petit Palais pour en tirer le portrait. Le parcours organisé en sept sections présente le travail de chaque photographe.

Vasco Ascolini (né en 1937, vit et travaille à Reggio Emilia)

Profondément marqué par l’univers théâtral au sein duquel il travaille longuement, Vasco Ascolini accorde une attention particulière aux effets dramatiques de la lumière. Les institutions muséales deviennent l’un de ses sujets de prédilection dès les années 1970. Attiré par les zones d’ombre et la gestuelle déclamatoire, Vasco Ascolini fait de la sculpture, ou plutôt des sculptures et de leur vie secrète, l’une de ses recherches majeures. Le photographe vient rencontrer celles du Petit Palais à l’automne 2016. L’utilisation exclusive du noir et blanc et du papier baryté accentuent la violence des contrastes, et les jeux de miroir et de trompe-l’œil égarent le spectateur. Vasco Ascolini donne une interprétation à la fois mélancolique et joueuse de l’ambiance du musée. Les superpositions, les flous et les cadrages à fleur d’objet font naître un étonnant peuple d’ombres.

Jean-Christophe Ballot (né en 1960, vit et travaille à Paris)

Architecte et cinéaste de formation, grand voyageur, Jean-Christophe Ballot axe son travail photographique sur la perception et le rendu de l’espace. Son approche se veut très classique : l’emploi de la chambre photographique et du trépied, le temps de pose de plusieurs secondes installent le photographe dans son sujet, et lui permettent de travailler la durée plutôt que l’instantané. Le travail avec la lumière naturelle, l’attention à la qualité intrinsèque de celle-ci à l’intérieur du bâtiment ont guidé les pas de Jean-Christophe Ballot au Petit Palais. S’attardant sur un angle de vue inattendu, sur un éclairage précis à une heure particulière, ses prises de vue paraissent retenir une présence fugitive. Le regard sur l’architecture se double d’un regard sur les œuvres, qui apparaissent sous un jour inattendu.

Stéphane Couturier (né en 1957, vit et travaille à Paris)

Depuis la fin des années 1980, Stéphane Couturier documente les transformations urbaines, en France, en Europe et dans le monde. Il suit ainsi les travaux du Grand Palais, effectuant plusieurs campagnes de prises de vues, entre 1997 et 2003-2004 – des premières interventions de consolidation à la pose des échafaudages pour la réalisation des travaux de la grande nef. Ce travail donne lieu aux deux portfolios présentés ici. Alors qu’il photographie le Grand Palais, le Petit Palais vit également sa rénovation. Ce bâtiment intrigue l’artiste. Il n’obtiendra malheureusement pas l’autorisation de suivre le chantier et ne pourra visiter les lieux qu’une fois. Privilégiant la vue frontale et la planéité, et fidèle à son goût pour l’indétermination spatiale, le photographe fait hésiter le spectateur : sommes-nous dedans ou dehors ? Avec ses vues dont il faut décrypter les strates, Stéphane Couturier nous propose des portraits de lieux invisibles et disparus.

Bruno Delamain (né en 1955, vit et travaille à Paris)

Photographe formé à l’école Louis Lumière, Bruno Delamain fait la connaissance de l’architecte Philippe Chaix en 1991. Une collaboration régulière s’engage. Lorsque Philippe Chaix est désigné avec Jean-Paul Morel pour conduire la rénovation du Petit Palais, le photographe leur emboîte le pas. Il y travaille de novembre 2005 à janvier 2006, s’intéressant aux coulisses d’une métamorphose. De ce travail naissent vingt-trois photographies noir et blanc, dont trois sont conservées aujourd’hui au musée. D’un noir profond, elles offrent une vision très abstraite du chantier : perspectives inattendues, lieux désertés, l’agitation disparaît au profit d’un regard méditatif sur la transformation architecturale. 

Flore (née en 1963, vit et travaille à Paris)

Lors de la rénovation du musée, la Mairie de Paris confie une carte blanche à l’artiste franco-espagnole Flore pour la couverture photographique du chantier. Ce travail, qui dure cinq ans (2000-2005), mène peu à peu l’artiste à produire un grand nombre d’images aujourd’hui dans la collection. Ces cinq années de travail lui ont permis d’établir un lien étroit avec le musée en mutation : elle promène son objectif dans les anciennes salles en cours de démantèlement, suit les pelleteuses qui creusent dans le jardin, observe la forêt d’échafaudages qui dérobe l’architecture au regard… De l’intérieur, elle accompagne la transformation, qui culmine avec la réinstallation des oeuvres dans leurs nouvelles salles. Des premiers tirages d’artiste tout en noirs ou aux couleurs estompées, évoquant la ruine envahissante dans des flous appuyés, en passant par une série qui évoque étrangement le monde souterrain, elle aboutit aux vues lumineuses des espaces vides et dorés.

Hélène Langlois (née en 1975, vit et travaille à Paris)

Après des études d’histoire de l’art à l’École du Louvre, Hélène Langlois entre ensuite à l’École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts du Mans où elle obtient son diplôme en 2001. Elle commence à travailler au Petit Palais en 2003. Munie de son appareil, elle parcourt l’espace en mutation durant trois ans. Elle se forge ainsi un regard personnel, et une approche de l’architecture très sensible au fragment et aux structures précaires. Son travail évolue avec le chantier, et se focalise peu à peu sur la couleur et ses subtiles variations, qu’elle observe dans les matériaux de rebut et les lieux inattendus. Il s’agit là des premières oeuvres achevées de la photographe : elles révèlent avec force un talent aujourd’hui affirmé, qui continue d’explorer la lumière quotidienne et ce qu’elle peut révéler de l’intime.

Julien Lescoeur (né en 1978, vit et travaille à Paris)

Julien Lescoeur se forme à la photographie lors de ses études artistiques, pratiquant notamment la peinture et le dessin. Son expérience en Allemagne s’avère essentielle dans le développement de son oeuvre : l’Ecole de Düsseldorf et le New Topographics, la ville de Berlin avec ses entre-deux et ses présences photographiques, nourrissent son travail. Invité à découvrir un bâtiment éloigné de ses sujets de prédilection, le Petit Palais représentant d’une architecture et d’un goût éclectiques et foisonnants, l’artiste s’est lancé le défi de traquer en ce palais Belle-Epoque les éléments ignorés d’une abbaye cistercienne. Et le défi est relevé : faisant preuve d’un regard singulier et surprenant pour qui connaît les lieux, le photographe transfigure l’espace. 

Commissaire de l'exposition : Susana Gàllego Cuesta, conservatrice en chef, responsable de la collection photographique du Petit Palais.

PETIT PALAIS, PARIS
Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
www.petitpalais.paris.fr