“Chasing Napoleon”

PALAIS DE TOKYO
13, Avenue du Président Wilson
October 16–January 17

Paul Laffoley, Temporality: The Great Within of the Universe, 1974, oil and acrylic on canvas, 73 x 73".

“Chasing Napoleon” assembles figures and apparitions from around 1977 and purports to track the utopian logic that links them: Theodore Kaczynski, not yet known as the Unabomber, holed up in his Montana cabin; the first appearance of Darth Vader in movie theaters; Dieter Roth in Iceland; Iraqi vice president Saddam Hussein recruiting look-alikes to appear in his place; the Community Reinvestment Act in the United States. All this occurred two centuries after a young Napoleon Bonaparte was admitted to the Brienne military academy. As far as curatorial concepts go, this one—the third in a series—is intriguing, even if grandiose and half-baked. The exhibition itself is a little tepid, though. Or rather it is often too literal (Robert Kusmirowski’s Unacabin, 2008, for example, or Gardar Eide Einarsson’s image of the Unabomber in his Untitled (Portrait), 2005). Still, there are surprises. Dieter Roth’s Reykjavik Slides, 1970–75; 1990–95), an installation of more than thirty thousand images of every house and street in Reykjavik, is convincing, especially because it doesn’t relate to the exhibition’s conceptual gambit in too obvious a fashion. The visionary paintings of Paul Laffoley, which treat themes from Heidegger to alien abduction in a mandalalike manner, are, from an aesthetic standpoint, disastrous, but their madcap intensity cannot be denied. Finally, mention must be made of Dora Winter’s reproduction of Kaczynski’s library; regardless of whether one is familiar with the Unabomber’s notions, put forth in his manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the arrangement of titles, ranging from Tacitus’s Annals to Cellini’s Autobiography to Poisonous Plants of the Central United States, is on all levels suggestive.

— David Lewis

Jean-Luc Vilmouth

GALERIE ALINE VIDAL
70, rue Bonaparte,
November 24–January 23

Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Entre Toi et moi (Between You and Me), 2006, perfume, Lalique crystal, dimensions variable.

This gallery’s central space glows with the artificial greens of Jean-Luc Vilmouth’s large wall-mounted neon piece that spells JUNGLE SCIENCE in cereal-box script. These are the colors of 7-Eleven signs, not the rain forest. Yet on the glass shelves that scaffold the text are Bodum beakers holding scraps of the natural world from three trips that the Paris-based artist took to the Amazon forest over a decade ago: toucan feathers, guarana, tobacco leaves, and butterflies, as well as crafts including arrowheads, a mask, and an ornamental comb given to the artist by a local tribe.

Smartly, Vilmouth never allows the natural world or the ethnographic “other” to become an idealized object of study. Likewise, the pursuit of exchange with and the desire to preserve or document indigenous cultures are not ironized as sinister or colonial. The heights of artifice and the sincerity of artifact and the natural world, which have played off and revealed each other in Vilmouth’s work since the 1980s, are distilled into one golden essence in Entre Toi et moi (Between You and Me), 2006. Based on an “interview” he held with a three-thousand-year-old Yaku cedar in the Yakushima region of southern Japan in 2006, the artist collaborated with perfumer Jean-Paul Osmont to create a pungent scent that evokes the cedar and its forest environment. Ask the gallery staff for a whiff and in department-store fashion you’ll be extended a spritz from a small sample vial. The essence of this bulbous, monumental tree and the memory of the artist’s “exchange” with it are displayed in a fragile, sylph-silhouetted, nearly two-foot-tall Lalique crystal flask. Floating in the luminous gold fluid, a reliquary crystal orb holds a knuckle-size knob of the Yaku cedar, alternately a message in a bottle from a lost civilization and the assurance of quality behind a commercial luxury.

— Julia Langbein

Laure Tixier

GALERIE POLARIS
8, rue Saint-Claude
January 9–February 6

Laure Tixier, Plaid House VI, 2009, felt, 71 x 71 1/2 x 74".

Recalling what she refers to as children’s “first imagined architectures”—the archetypal constructions conceived under blankets or with a quilt thrown over a table—French artist Laure Tixier mines a psychological space through the language of design and domestic crafts. Her project began with delicate sketches on paper depicting a variety of iconic structures, such as castles, cabins, and Le Corbusier–esque dwellings. Tixier separates her imagined architectures from context, landscape, and inhabitants, placing each structure in the center of a sheet of warm-hued, textured paper. In her exhibition “Plaid Houses,” she presents fifty of these drawings, which serve as source material for her village of hand-stitched felt maquettes, each a different color, completely covering the floor of the gallery’s central room. Uniting a range of geographic and cultural references—a tepee, a minaret, an igloo, churches, and fortresses—her installation renders a colorful, albeit vulnerable, topography. Each of the monochromatic structures has been stitched together with cotton thread, allowing them to gently bend and droop.

Two large houses, Plaid House VI (all works 2009), in hot pink, and Plaid House IV, in bright orange, stand in the middle of the gallery. For these structures, Tixier used sturdier thread and panels of felt several inches thick. The sculptures are big enough to tempt one to sneak inside and small enough—soft enough—to offer the promise of a cozy place to hide. Channeling a child’s perspective, and rendering her work through the simple, domestic processes of sketching and sewing, Tixier nonetheless touches on a very real contemporary dialogue: Switzerland and France are in the midst of debates on the legality of Islamic minarets in the national landscape—an issue that speaks to one of Tixier’s fundamental concerns: architecture’s essential function as physical, psychological, and spiritual shelter.

— Lillian Davies

Keren Cytter

LE PLATEAU
angle de la rue des alouettes et de la rue carducci
December 9–February 14

Keren Cytter, Repulsion, 2005, still from a three-channel color video, 5 minutes.

This exhibition, Keren Cytter’s first in France, consists of the videos Four Seasons, 2009, Something Happened, 2007, Der Spiegel (The Mirror), 2007, The Mysterious Series, 2000–2006, In Search for Brothers, 2008, Repulsion, 2006, and Untitled, 2009. There is also a small room of drawings, as well as the larger drawings Vinyl, 2009, and Pentagram, 2009, each of which, we are told, bears a structural relationship to the video that follows in the next room. Additionally, there is a table with copies of Cytter publications, including her novels The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats (2005) and The Seven Most Exciting Hours of Mr. Trier’s Life in Twenty-four Chapters (2008). The videos have all been shown previously. The show is constructed, like each of the videos, as a conceptual labyrinth (the wall texts, for instance, contradict one another) and is, as expected, impressive. What comes across in particular is the artist’s extraordinary technical agility, on all levels, as well as the exceptional evenness, or aloofness, or perhaps insouciance, of her tone: Though each individual video (virtually all of which culminate in, or begin with, murder) is histrionic, her practice, considered as a whole, is unmannered, without a hint of struggle or strain. Also noteworthy is the offhand sadism throughout—a mannered sexual savagery of a most specific bourgeois, modern European type.

— David Lewis

Øystein Aasan

LA VITRINE
24 rue Moret,
December 17–February 20

View of “Øystein Aasan,” 2009. From left: Display Unit (UT UT UT), 2007; Double Trouble, 2009; Devil’s Canyon (Like jungle beasts they fight for her love!), 2009; and Memory Game, 2009.

Norwegian artist Øystein Aasan has something up his sleeve: controlled explosions of images or text that stealthily disarm their reader. Aasan divides his source materials into small squares, spaced at small intervals, as if a grid of negative space has wedged apart the image. In “Double Trouble,” his modest presentation at La Vitrine, a poster of Alfred Werker’s 1953 Devil’s Canyon has been thusly “pixelated” and affixed to Alu-Dibond panels. In Display Unit (UT UT UT), 2007, the gridded content is a phrase from Finnegans Wake. Printed on slanted shelves in a “display unit” lined with mirror paper, the isolated characters seem to float off into their reflections, making reading a feat of memory to battle the Babel in Joyce’s babble. The Tower of Babel, incidentally, is a reference Aasan attributes to his ongoing work and source archive Never ending memory, which is absent from the exhibition but adumbrated by two other works in the show: Double Trouble, 2009, resembles a series of long troughs placed vertically, echoing the hand-built drawers that house the archive. Memory Game, 2009, is a short sequence of slides in which blanks alternate with selections from these files, photographed together in a vitrine, like cards in the eponymous game. The opening moments of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) come to mind—“the image of happiness” intercut with black leader—as does the pliable narrative promise of the photographs in W. G. Sebald’s novels.

There is something forlorn about this tribute to memory, a faculty under siege; the anachronistic efforts of the pastime seem to buckle under Aasan’s crisp aesthetic, which itself embraces the currently ubiquitous look of nostalgia. Just like images in the children’s game of Memory, Aasan’s materials—plywood, MDF, anonymous photos, and imagery appropriated from old B-grade culture—pop up all over the place these days. That he can nonetheless invest them with pathos and surprise makes his memory game look indeed like a magic trick.

— Joanna Fiduccia

Claire Morgan

GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE
5, rue Debelleyme
January 16–February 25

Claire Morgan, Silver Lining, 2009, taxidermied barn owl and rat, thistle seeds, dandelion seeds, lead weights, nylon, acrylic, 75 x 24 x 24".

From the far side of the gallery, Architecture, 2009, one of Claire Morgan’s suspended installations, almost disappears into thin air. From a grate of clear acrylic dowels on the ceiling hang rows of nylon fishing line, threaded through the minuscule bodies of hundreds of dead fruit flies in exact planes that stack up to form intersecting architectural rectangles nine feet high. Above and below the rectangles, a few flies break away along the threads, either dissipating from or coalescing into their cubic swarm, a ghostly mapping of the unknowable or unseeable geometry of animal behavior. This combination of meticulous perfection and organic movement, of stasis and irruption, runs through each of the Belfast-born artist’s installations, populated by hovering protagonists from the natural world. In Silver Lining, 2009, instead of gnats, Morgan has beaded her suspended nylon-line grid with individual thistle and dandelion spores. At the top of this precision-woven geometry of organic dust in space, a menacing owl; tumbling through the bottom, a splayed rat.

In addition to these staged narrative dramas, Morgan’s first solo show in France is particularly noteworthy for the formal drama among the nine installations themselves and the related works on paper. Morgan carries out the taxidermy of her animal subjects, slicing, skinning the carcasses of a hedgehog, a pigeon, an owl, spilling blood and preservative chemicals on top of watercolor paper like an operating table. She then draws her crisp architectural plans on that paper alongside the traces of the taxidermic process. To see the guts and the grid, the muck of the process and its imagined completion on paper, and then to hope to find the drawing materialized in the next room, the thousand spores shivering on their threads as projected, is truly a study in suspense.

— Julia Langbein

Jean Michel Alberola

GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON
30, rue Beaubourg
January 9–March 6

Jean-Michel Alberola, Celui qui cycliste (The One Who Bicycles), 2002, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 7/8".

Jean Michel Alberola’s exhibition at this gallery offers his latest series of works, which range from paintings to wall drawings. Through a patchwork of figurative and abstract elements, along with occasional bursts of Dada-esque writing, the artist develops a visual language that remains at the edge between explicit meaning and unconscious emotion. This juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements creates a double metamorphosis whereby words and letters are reduced to mere graphic components, while abstract shapes and colors take on a rich symbolic meaning.

In the oil painting Celui qui montre (The One Who Shows), 2009, Alberola prompts the viewer to imagine an anthropomorphic silhouette from no more than a pair of freestanding feet and a red hat literally lost in the middle of numerous overlapping, irregular shapes that resemble an aerial view of geographic topographies. Alberola challenges the viewer to find meaning in a seemingly meaningless juxtaposition of shapes, words, and colors. In the wall painting executed in situ, La Sortie est à l’intérieur (The Exit Is Inside), 2010, Alberola’s medium recalls frescoes, his writing evokes street art, and his words bring to mind Marcel Duchamp. Despite Alberola’s use of traditional media, the artist nonetheless questions assumptions with his enigmatic works and words. Beyond conjuring pure aesthetic emotions, the result engages viewers in an interactive search for meaning, as they attempt to derive one holistic message from a multitude of stimuli.

— Julia Moreno de Rouvray

Grégory Derenne

GALERIE BERTRAND GRIMONT
47 Rue De Montmorency
January 18–March 13

Grégory Derenne, Plato 1, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 57 1/2".

Grégory Derenne’s interior landscapes––figurative paintings of television soundstages, art galleries, and shop fronts––balance photorealism with an exaggerated sense of light and darkness. Typically working from his own photographs, Derenne builds his compositions atop a base of black paint, punctuating his canvases with strokes of bright white, pale blue, pink, or yellow––points of light that melt across his carefully constructed spaces. Like Degas, who consistently pulled his viewpoint of the theater stage back into the shadows, seemingly peeking out from behind the curtains at the ballerinas, Derenne places his perspective outside the action, withdrawing to a position likely unseen and unnoticed by those we are observing.

A number of his neatly composed large-scale acrylic works depict sets of various French television programs––each identifiable through a signature decor or color scheme. However, we are unable to identify the personalities on the live platform, as Derenne turns our attention to the otherwise-invisible structures (cameras, spotlights, and backdrops) necessary for the production of the spectacle. In the background of Plato Guillaume Durand, 2009, we see an image of Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God, 2007, a work that was the catalyst for an international performance of wealth, publicity, and power. Derenne incorporates a blurred image of Hirst’s sculpture into his visual commentary on the creation of illusion.

Recently, Derenne has started to work in oil, producing a series of small-scale paintings, titled “Puit” (Well), 2009, that maintain the staging of his larger compositions. Picturing collectors in dark suits, seen through skylights installed above a basement-level space, Derenne uses the edge of the windows as a natural frame for his compositions, choosing an angle where our gaze has no chance of meeting that of the subjects. Although Derenne places himself as outsider in these images, he reveals a clear sense of the dynamics of the scenes he so studiously observes.

— Lillian Davies

Elina Brotherus

GB AGENCY
20, rue Louise Weiss
January 9–March 20

Elina Brotherus, La Liseuse (Reader), 2001, color photograph, 27 1/2 x 22".

This gallery devotes two consecutive shows over the season to Finnish photographer and video artist Elina Brotherus: the current retrospective of medium- to large-format color photographs from the past ten years, followed by an exhibition of new photographs and video. The retrospective reveals Brotherus to be moving away from the self-portraiture of her early series “Das Mädchen sprach von Liebe” (The Girl Spoke of Love), 1997–1999, in which the artist bares tears and bruises that index an episode of real-life grief, toward a self-consciously antidocumentary photographic practice motivated by concerns of pictorial composition rooted in the history of painting. This shift might be symbolized in Brotherus’s progression of pictures by a gradual 180-degree turn of the subject (usually the artist herself): She faces down the camera in the early series, whereas in “The New Painting,” 2000–2004, and “Model Studies,” 2002–, figures are viewed from behind, foregrounding expansive landscapes that have provoked comparison to the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich. Brotherus stops short of art-historical game playing, but her referents are more specific than a mere painterly concern for color or perspectival cues. The matte, white unblemishedness of the nude favored as a subject by the nineteenth-century academy is unmistakable in Baigneuse, orage montant (Bather, Rising Storm), 2003; the naked figure perches on a rock before a rippling sea that recedes to the horizon without modulations in focus—a wealth of glassy, lapidary detail that nearly boasts its skillful brush. The thematic codes of the Salon permeate, in model studies, bathers, and a woman at her toilette. In the exquisite Liseuse (Reader), 2001, sunlight ignites the silhouette of a woman engrossed in a book; a shopping bag momentarily glowing like frosted glass, the fibers of a frayed red cuff, and the gossamer surface of the reader’s wrist compel too strongly to leave room for grief.

— Julia Langbein

“Insiders”

ENTREPÔT LAINÉ, MUSÉE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN DE BORDEAUX (CAPC)
7, rue Ferrère
October 9–February 7

View of “Insiders,” 2009.

For ideological, economic, and ecological reasons, architects are increasingly interested in traditional crafts and alternative, homespun techniques. Artists, for their part, are appropriating local customs, ancestral lore, minor narratives, and events. Comprising both artworks and architectural projects, this exhibition focuses on the impact of the indigenous and the everyday on these two disciplines. Downplaying standardization and sophistication, it celebrates instead heterogeneity, DIY, and the mundane.

Celebration is one of the curatorial keywords that resurfaces throughout “Insiders,” alongside such notions as collecting, recycling, imitating, and the dichotomy between high and low culture. Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op.11, 2009, is an example of the latter. It consists of YouTube sequences of cats playing the piano edited into a performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s eponymous dodecaphonic composition. The images lose their chocolate-box quality when associated with the music, taking on its highbrow connotations while blurring the boundaries between high art and popular imagery.

Applying advanced technology to basic materials, the Los Angeles–based architects Ball & Nogues Studio use sophisticated digital tools to “print” a network of cables in such a way that a virtual three-dimensional volume appears in their midst when viewed from afar. Meanwhile, other works commemorate traditional practices or architectural styles. Take Janet Lee Scott’s collection of traditional Chinese paper offerings of exquisite replicas of telephones, shirts, or shoes designed to be burned at funerals, or architect Terunobu Fujimori’s bewitching insectlike teahouses on stilts that rework local traditions into novel styles and forms. In architecture, the vernacular is generally looked down on, while in art it can be a rich source of inspiration. In this exhibition, however, the architects vie with the artists when it comes to exploiting the liberating, devil-may-care energy of popular culture.

— Rahma Khazam

Bettina Samson

LA GALERIE
La Galerie, 1, rue Jean-Jaurès, Noisy-le-Sec,
December 5–February 13

Bettina Samson, Spectre Solarie, 2009, mixed materials. Installation view.

When the art historian Hal Foster coined the term “archival impulse,” he was referring to the practice of collecting and reordering historical information that he identified in the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Tacita Dean. The works on display in Bettina Samson’s solo exhibition also come under this category: They, too, interweave disparate events and temporalities, generating alternative archival systems that breathe new life into historical facts.

The show opens with a group of objects and photographs referring to key moments in the history of modern science. White flashes on the photos—produced by exposing the film to the radioactive mineral pitchblende—materialize the phenomenon of radioactivity while also documenting the artist’s reenactment of the circumstances surrounding its accidental discovery by the French physicist Becquerel in 1896. A giant replica of the latter’s workbench evokes a monument to the glory of science, while beneath it a small plaque displays a letter written by Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in 1939, containing recommendations relating to the development of the atomic bomb.

A second group of works likewise underscores the shortcomings of utopian visions. Five statuettes exuding confidence and joy represent members of the short-lived Californian socialist colony Llano del Rio. Alongside them, a book by Aldous Huxley, who years later happened to live close to its ruins, outlines the reservations of the author of Brave New World about this utopian project. Elsewhere, a black-and-white video shows faint, blurred images of a previous exhibition by the artist. Comprising some of the same works now on view, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the present show. By pinpointing instances of serendipity, coincidence, inadequacy, and similarity, Samson’s archival structures sharpen our vision of the past while inviting us to rethink the present.

— Rahma Khazam