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

“The Colin de Land Library”

BALICE HERTLING
47 Rue Ramponeau
January 30–February 27

View of “The Colin de Land Library,” 2010.

Some lessons from Colin de Land, whose library has been reassembled, on its original shelves, at the Parisian apartment of Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling. First: Always buy the most colorful copy of the work in question; favor books with hot-pink spines or cobalt-yellow covers (Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic [1972] by István Mészáros, for instance), and leave particularly garish price tags in place as points of pride. Second: Self-help and gossip add intellectual heft. Consider, in addition to art-world staples by Anthony Hayden-Guest, lesser-known gems like David J. Schwarz’s The Magic of Getting What You Want (1987) and Nigel Cawthorne’s Sex Lives of the Presidents (1996). Third: Pornography should be somewhat specialized and a tiny bit wry—a blind porn star in Cunt Vision, for instance. Last: Stay fluid and open-minded. Treat Napoleon Hill as a member of the Frankfurt School (Think and Grow Rich [1937] pairs well with Negative Dialectics [1966]); allow New York School poets to mingle with contemporaries like Lita Hornick (To Elizabeth and Eleanor: Great Queens Who Loved Poetry [1993]); mix George Foreman’s knock-out-the-fat barbecue tricks with Mao, Chanel, and Lyotard. Which is to say: Be pragmatic; contain multitudes, like Whitman—like de Land.

— David Lewis

“Cinématique, Esthétique, Politique, Hermetique”

ART:CONCEPT
13 rue Arquebusiers
January 9–February 28

Jeremy Deller, Theme for the Fourth Berlin Biennial by Klezmer Chidesch, 2006, still from a color video, 6 minutes 54 seconds.

The Rancièrian theories of the visible and sayable have for a long time now dominated the art field. But what about the invisible and the unknowable? Can the aestheticization of the obscure become political? Art Concept’s latest exhibition, “Cinématique, Esthétique, Politique, Hermetique” (Cinematics, Aesthetics, Politics, Hermetics), presents a looped program of artists’ films that resist the spectacular and the didactic through a language of hermetic symbols, specters, and phantasmagoric reenactments. Here the theatrical meets the occult, the stage blends with the backstage, and the present bifurcates in past and future times. The most compelling work on view is Ulla von Brandenburg’s The Objects, 2009, a black-and-white film of animated still lifes, which features timeless objects like mirrors, chessboards, compasses, and combs acting in a circular theatrum mundi that sees the entire world as stage. Another discovery is Lothar Hempel’s mesmerizing Ikarus, 2003. This film depicts puppetlike figures with no emotional engagement who are caught up in a fin de siècle reverie. If the objects became marionettes in Brandenburg’s nature morte, the actors have become objects in Hempel’s avant-garde-looking film. The most unexpected work in the program is Jeremy Deller’s touching documentary about a marginalized band of klezmer players, which was made for the fourth Berlin Biennial in 2006. The intimacy of Deller’s staged rehearsal is beautifully and respectfully rendered. Who said that fine and folk art, the visible and the invisible, are irreconcilable?

— Sinziana Ravini

Stephan Crasneanscki

ILAN ENGEL & LOUISE ALEXANDER GALLERY
77 rue des Archives Paris,
January 27–March 3

Stephan Crasneanscki, Troie (Troy), 2009, two color photographs, 31 x 61" overall. From the series “Le Syndrome d’Ulysse” (The Ulysses Syndrome), 2009.

Echoing the impulse of his well-known Soundwalks, in this exhibition the New York–based artist Stephan Crasneanscki presents ten photographic diptychs––images of the Mediterranean Sea and its eastern coastlines––that follow Ulysses’s epic voyage. The story of Ulysses’s odyssey was, for most of history, transmitted by voice, by sound––a medium that resonates with Crasneanscki’s larger practice. However, here the artist’s images, although of a journey many times told, are silent and still, artifacts of a grander narrative that is impossible to re-create.

Some of Crasneanscki’s photographs, all from 2009, such as Troie (Troy) and Iles Ionennes (Ionian Islands), are nearly monochrome, the sea and the sky melting together in washes of white or black. Other works, like Ile de Djerba (Djerba Island) and Mont Pellegrino (Mount Pellegrino), picture the sea in brilliant shades of blue beneath a bleached or cloudy horizon. Each photograph was taken from a sailboat positioned twelve nautical miles from the shore, the border between national and international waters, thus rendering the photographs timeless. There are no boats or watercraft on the sea, no high-rises, resorts, or even villages on the coastline. The water and the land seem untouched, as we imagine Ulysses must have experienced these sites.

For the finished works, Crasneanscki split his photographic prints with a vertical slice, creating two uneven parts, each framed in white. A thin space separates the facing sides of the photographs, suggestive of what Crasneanscki describes as the break between the real experience of a place and the shadow it throws on memory and representation.

— Lillian Davies

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

Pierre Soulages

CENTRE POMPIDOU
Place Georges-Pompidou
October 14–March 8

Pierre Soulages, Peinture (Painting), 1950, oil on canvas, 57 1/2 x 45".

To see the Pompidou’s Pierre Soulages retrospective, spanning more than sixty years of artistic output, is to process the evolution of an idea, to experience a panoramic progression toward formal purity. Of the two modes of artistic creativity identified by the Chicago economist David Galenson—Old Masters, who develop their work gradually through years of trial and error, and Young Geniuses, who upend convention in a flash of inspired certitude—Soulages, age ninety, is firmly situated in the former camp.

The narrative begins with Soulages’s innovative walnut-stain works from the late 1940s. Almost like proto–Franz Klines (if less calligraphic and more static), they feature carefully rendered abstract forms centered on canvas. From here, Soulages loosens his brushwork, introduces color (mostly muted patches of ocher and maize), and extends the pictorial plane beyond the confines of the frame. Dating from the 1950s, these tactile and layered works are characteristic of the postwar impulse toward gestural abstraction, whether the European tachism or its American counterpart, Abstract Expressionism. By the late 1960s, Soulages reverts to a monochrome palette; black begins to conquer the canvas with stark, graphic intensity. Though these works remain gestural and dynamic, his touch is methodical, measured, and deliberate. This tendency is fully realized in his monochrome “outrenoir” (ultra-black) works, which he began in 1979 and continues to produce. Reflective surfaces are usually thought to interfere with vision, but Soulages’s deploys oil paint or, more recently, acrylic to create texture and court reflection. His treatments, ranging from fine, parallel striations to thickly troweled staccato strokes, orchestrate sublime dramas of shadow and light.

— Natasha Degen

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

Brice Dellsperger

AIR DE PARIS
32, rue Louise Weiss
February 20–March 20

Brice Dellsperger, Body Double 22, 2007, still from a color film, 35 minutes.

In this installment of Brice Dellsperger’s series “Body Double,” 1995–, which spans twenty-four video projects, the Paris-based artist continues to remake sequences from feature films, especially psychosexual thrillers like the 1984 Brian De Palma movie for which the series is named. In Body Double 22, 2007, Dellsperger’s longtime collaborator Jean-Luc Verna, an artist whose pierced and tattooed body is unmistakable and specific, plays every character, including the central married couple, in sequences taken from Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Dellsperger digitally stitches the actor into the scene in multiples: Dozens of menacing Vernas, hooded in red, witness the high priest Verna order the commencement of a sexual ritual performed by docile, available Vernas; in the background, a Verna hammers on an electric keyboard. The dialogue of a tightly wound thriller unspools and is rewoven as inchoate melodrama. Dime-store wigs, pared-down sets, imprecise lip-syncing (doublage in French), and the epileptic seams of digital editing do more than simply parody the luxe art direction of a Hollywood feature. These techniques treat films as bodies, re-dressing them in a way that reminds viewers of the common root of travesty and transvestite but also cutting into them, rearranging, castrating, or enhancing, with the editing scars left in view. With Body Double 23, 2007, a remake of De Palma’s remake of murdered starlet Elizabeth Short’s audition reel in The Black Dahlia (2006), Dellsperger’s sixteen-year use of the director’s oeuvre as medium ensures that he operates not just on the level of a single film but on that of individual, career, genre, and historiography.

— Julia Langbein

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