Julio Le Parc

PALAIS DE TOKYO
13, Avenue du Président Wilson
February 27–May 13

View of “Julio Le Parc,” 2013.

For the past half century, Julio Le Parc has created disorienting and elating sensorial experiences by manipulating light and reflection with kinetic constructions. The entry to the artist’s largest-ever survey in France is via a dense forest of suspended full-length mirrors. Navigating through Passage-cellule agrandie du labyrinth de 1963 (Cell-Passage Enlargement of the 1963 Maze), 1963–2013, the viewer is besieged by his own undulating, infinitely reflected image—and thereby initiated into a dual role as spectator and active participant.

Never straying far from a basic recipe of mirrors, motors, and a light source, Le Parc’s illusions are dazzling, but not mysterious. In fact, the candid design of his perception-altering oeuvre—which ranges from articulated Op art paintings (the “Contorsion” series, begun in the mid-1960s) to immersive installations—encourages investigation. A particularly spectacular example is Continuel-Lumière Cylindre (Continual Light Cylinder), 1962–2005, which gives the impression of laser beams crisscrossing an enormous smoky orifice. Closer inspection reveals an empty wall-mounted frame whose circular design bounces light, originally emanating from a box on the floor, back and forth over a slightly textured wall.

Though formative works from the 1960s and ‘70s are duly represented, this exhibition is not couched as a historical retrospective. The emphasis, rather, is on the eighty-four-year-old artist’s remarkable contemporariness. Instead of linking Le Parc to artists of his own generation such as Jesús-Rafael Soto and François Morellet, the nonchronological presentation seems to allude to younger artists who also work with light and reflection, including Olafur Eliasson and Jeppe Hein. A re-creation of Le Parc’s interactive playthings in the exhibition’s final room further emphasizes the artist’s youthful spirit. Though nearly fifty years have passed since these works first appeared, Jeu enquête: Les mythes (Game Survey: Myths), 1965–2013 (a ball toss with targets ranging from Mickey Mouse to Uncle Sam), Miroir en vibration (Mirror in Vibration), 1965–2013 (a motorized fun-house mirror), and Douze Lunettes pour une vision autre (Twelve Glasses for an Alterior Vision), 1965–2013 (vision-altering eyeglasses that won Le Parc the Grand Prize at the 1966 Venice Biennale), still offer pure delight.

— Mara Hoberman

“Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s): An Exhibition Without Texts: second movement”

MAISON D'ART BERNARD ANTHONIOZ
16 rue Charles VII, Nogent-sur Marne
March 21–May 19

View of “Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s): A Spoken Word Exhibition: first movement,” 2013.

For the project “Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s),” curator Mathieu Copeland sets out to investigate how to experience language in both material and conceptual terms. He has planned four separate exhibitions that will unfold over the next year, two of which are currently on view: At Jeu de Paume, “A Spoken Word Exhibition: first movement” distills linguistic signs into speech matters and memory actions, and at Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz, “An Exhibition Without Texts: second movement” proposes a cryptographic game. As it evolves, the rest of “Suite” will provide ample room and material to encounter, digest, and take the word away as a memory, a pocket-size exhibition “to hear read” elsewhere.

At MABA, it seems Copeland is the conductor of an assembled orchestra where exhibition texts and wall labels contradict themselves—printed in a barely legible font created by Jacques Villegle, these statements, intended to be pedagogical, morph into cryptic statements. While the exhibition—with paintings hung neatly on the walls and objects displayed on pedestals and in vitrines—feels traditional in format, the works themselves react against this presentation in forcing language beyond conceptual tautologies, pointing to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés jamias n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1897). For instance, Matt Golden’s screenprint Cloud, 2012, is an image of various proposals, descriptions, summaries, and e-mails he has written about his work—a presentation that poignantly screws with the signs of legibility that enable his artistic practice.

Of note at Jeu de Paume are “voice retrospectives” by Yona Friedman, Gustav Metzger, and David Medalla, which echo against a black boxlike interstice. In each, the artists reflect on their accomplishments, specifically on works that marked significant points in their careers. Looped sequences that play endlessly, these stories demand a level of attention and consideration that seems daring to request of a visitor, though along with which may come a telling satisfaction that only exceptional storytelling can bring. As in “An Exhibition Without Texts: second movement,” the word is free to act outside traditional didactic formats, which in both cases reclaims a different sort of meaning.

“Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s): A Spoken Word Exhibition: first movement” is on view at Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, Paris, from February 26 to May 12, 2013.

— Julie Solovyeva

“Sous Influences”

LA MAISON ROUGE
10, Boulevard de la Bastille
February 15–May 19

Yayoi Kusama, Dots Obsession (Infinity Mirrored Room), 1998, mixed media. Installation view, 2013.

“Sous Influences” (Under Influences) could be the most comprehensive exhibition of hallucinogenic drug-induced and drug-inspired artworks to have ever been conceived. Walking through the labyrinthine show is enough to make visitors feel as though they are inadvertently experiencing a dizzying trip; the ubiquitous presence of acidic colors, surrealist imagery, and neon lights only provide further gateways down the rabbit hole.

One of the first and largest works one encounters is Vincent Mauger’s 2007 untitled sculpture consisting of silver-grey waves of PVC tubes arranged in such a way as to trick the eye; after one looks at the work for some time, the waves seemingly begin to move. The scrawled, frantically executed pen drawings by Jean-Martin Charcot, such as Dessin sous l’influence du haschich (Drawing Under the Influence of Hashish), 1853, are equally captivating. Its effect disengages the mind from the requisite effort of having to decipher all of the intricate details as if in a blur. Yayoi Kusama’s large-scale installation, Dots Obsession (Infinity Mirrored Room), 1998, similarly provokes a sense of instability and corporeal dysfunction. The work consists of red balloons with white dots that float within a room lined with mirrors, effectively casting the viewer as Alice in her sinister Wonderland or as a naive newborn enveloped in a diseased, cystic womb.

Despite Jeanne Susplugas’s affirmation that L’aspirine c’est le champagne du matin (Aspirin Is the Champagne of the Morning), 2009, the exhibition at one point leaves visitors feeling as though they were coming down from a high. The unsettling photographic work of Larry Clark, Alberto García-Alix, and Antoine d’Agata present a desensationalized documentation of drug abusers in squalid conditions. García-Alix’s Gabriel, 1980, for example, depicts a young man stretching tensely in front of a wall on which the word “FIX” is aptly scrawled, suggesting that drug lust has a constant place within his consciousness. This exhibition presents a beautiful spectrum of drug use in art and artistic production, encompassing not only a Baudelairian paradis artificiel but also the harrowing reality of addiction.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Eileen Gray

CENTRE POMPIDOU
Place Georges-Pompidou
February 20–May 20

Eileen Gray, Paravent en bricques (Brick Screen), 1919–22, black lacquered wood, dimensions variable.

The first work encountered in this exhibition is not, as might be expected, one of Eileen Gray’s designs or objects, but rather a Percy Wyndham Lewis drawing, Lady with a French Poodle, 1902. The “Lady” in question is indeed Gray herself, and the portrait prefigures the refreshing tone of this important retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. Here is an artist-designer whose works—each of which is unique due to her refusal to manufacture products en masse—are inherently born from her relationships with those around her.

The exhibition is presented in sections relating either to, on the one hand, the medium or material of the works displayed or, on the other, to their relevance to a stage or person in Gray’s life. As a result of this, Eileen Gray as a person, rather than as just an artistic hand, is omnipresent throughout the show. Each of her designs clearly displays the wide range of her artistic influences—from the Cubist majesty of Paravent en bricques (Brick Screen), 1919–22, to the retrospection toward antiquity and its mythical creatures in her Sirène (Mermaid) armchair, circa 1919, which has a mermaid carved into its back. Another room features her drawings for rug designs, which, without context, could easily be mistaken for works of the Russian avant-garde. The exhibition also gives pride of place to one of the great masterpieces of Gray’s career, the E 1027 villa, circa 1926–29—her first move from decorative work into architecture—conceived with Jean Badovici, a man with whom she had a close if enigmatic relationship.

“Eileen Gray” provides an affectingly personal glimpse into the life and work of this seminal designer. By intrinsically linking multiple aspects of her art with her relationships and life experiences, this retrospective offers a refreshing perspective on Art Deco and modernist design.

— Ashitha Nagesh

Jimmie Durham

GALERIE MICHEL REIN
42 rue de Turenne
April 1–June 1

Jimmie Durham, Untitled 13, 2007, pigment on paper, wooden frame, 27 1/2 x 19 1/2. From the series “Atelier Calder,” 2007.

Jimmie Durham’s drawings, made during his residency at Atelier Calder in Saché, France, draw the viewer into a contemplative state while also inciting a profound sense of anxiety. Visible within the fourteen drawings (all works untitled, 2007) in this exhibition are ropes, fish, and explosions of graphite pigments. Sheets of white paper, sometimes showing traces of fingerprints around the edges, have been brutalized in places—almost to the point of tearing—through the artist’s process: Durham immerses pieces of rope and rubber fish in a bag filled with graphite powder and then throws them onto paper, resulting in an imprint that creates the look of a drawing.

At first, the ultrarealism of these works seems to contrast with the swift, raw, and almost childlike strokes of Durham’s previous drawings. Yet, his intuitive technique coupled with the rope and fish motifs—both charged with symbolism from numerous ancient civilizations—is in keeping with his longstanding attempt to return to a primitive understanding of the world. Durham’s automatic approach echoes, in a way, Brassaï’s photographs of graffiti: For the French artist, “recapturing innocence” seems to be “the only antidote to technical and scientific excess.” Although these drawings voice no overt political or social commentary, they do echo Durham’s concerns, which are expressed in his writing: “I know of a scientist who will no longer eat fish because he has seen for himself the amount of plastic within the tissues of fish. Plastic broken down to its small, practically indestructible molecules. It’s like fish are becoming plastic.” The delicacy yet brutality of these works pulls at the viewer; one relearns how to decipher a forgotten language where form seems to be the result of accident, following an endlessly evolving temporary logic.

Translated from French by Jane Brodie

— Julie Jones

“The Lie and the Powerpoint”

SHANAYNAY
78 rue des Amandiers
May 11–June 15

Liam Gillick, Benoît Maire, and Falke Pisano, The Lie and The Powerpoint (detail), 2013, video projection, PowerPoint with audio, fish decal, canvas, plastic, wood.

The latest addition to Parisian project space Shanaynay’s innovative exhibition program, “The Lie and the Powerpoint” stages a unique encounter between the art of Liam Gillick, Benoît Maire, and Falke Pisano. Rather than presenting three separate works on a common theme, it amalgamates the three participants’ ideas and intentions into a single piece. Like these artists’ previous cooperative endeavors—whether with other practitioners or each other—it implies the relinquishment of individual authorship and expression, while confirming that collaboration has become, as critic Godfrey Worsdale has pointed out, a kind of pseudomedium, alongside performance and installation.

Echoing the three artists’ shared interest in the written word, the work itself revolves around a text delivered as a PowerPoint presentation. Ringtones issuing from a speaker announce, muezzin-like, the start of the presentation, inviting visitors to gather round. An illustration projected on the ceiling simultaneously with the sounds references Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Owl and the Pussycat”—a title that resonates with that of the exhibition, suggesting that the text to follow will be of similar tenor. Consisting of a dialogue between two anonymous characters—the first of whom expresses himself in bold and the second in a regular typeface—the text reveals itself to be peppered with typos, non sequiturs, and contradictions. The fact that the statements in bold are as confusing as the rest of the text questions the implicit authority of bold over regular typefaces. Meanwhile, the nonsensical nature of the dialogue as a whole undermines the credibility of the PowerPoint itself—by showing it up as a medium that peddles fictions as truths. Trenchant and to the point, “The Lie and the Powerpoint” also evacuates such superfluous considerations as who did what and why. Instead it invites the viewer to judge the work on show on its own merits—without doubt the most important question of all.

— Rahma Khazam

Julia Rometti and Victor Costales

JOUSSE ENTREPRISE
6 rue Saint-Claude
June 10–June 15

Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, untitled, 2013, silver print on barita paper barita, 21 x 15 3/4". From the series “Incomplete Infinity,” 2013.

The title of Julia Rometti and Victor Costales’s latest exhibition, “El Perspectivista,” is a nod to Amazonian perspectivism, a movement developed in the 1990s by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which posits that animals and plants possess human souls. Rometti and Costales have been working collaboratively for six years in Latin America, particularly focusing their studies on the region and its alternative terrains of thought and history. Here, they have created a body of work including conceptual installations and detailed documentation that takes up shamanistic concerns while countering traditional Western notions of space and vantage point. Consider the black-and-white photographic series “Incomplete Infinity,” 2013, which features stark, rocky landscapes; each photograph is taken from different angles behind a set of bars. By imaging landscapes literally jailed by a framing device that creates a sense of scale, the artists subtly begin to tug at the viewing standards imposed by centuries of Western artistic culture. Structures are collapsed and perspectives opened.

Amplifying this theme is “Americanas,” 2013, also a series of black-and-white photographs. Here, the artists focus on agaves to the extent that they seem less like plants and more like camouflaged human beings. As such, “Americanas” evokes one of the key strands of perspectivism, that the natural world possesses energies and powers that might engender strategies for living in a more ecological and nonhierarchical environment—a sentiment echoed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in her presentation of Documenta 13 (i.e., the concept of the traumatized object, which springs from the cultural theory of “collapse and recovery”). These ideas naturally play into tenets of shamanism, blurring distinctions between what is considered magic and what is considered objective reality, alive or inanimate. In L’Inconsistance des Pierres Sauvages (The Inconstancy of the Savage Stones), 2013, two projectors show slides of volcanic stones on neutral backgrounds, which the artists also display in the form of two real rock specimens in another work included in the show. The volcanic stones are presented as at once physical and immaterial beings, and in a manner that is quasi-scientific, even classificatory. At play here is the possibility of streamlining the potential of mystics into the tangible world of lived, material experience.

— Caroline Hancock

Dominique Blais

MAISON DU PEUPLE
39 Boulevard du Général Leclerc
February 22–May 12

Dominique Blais, Untitled (35-39), 2012–13, PMMA mirror boxes, flight cases, video. Installation view.

Dominique Blais’s two-part work Untitled (35-39), 2012–13, features a sculpture and a video that pay homage to Jean Prouvé, Eugène Beaudouin, Marcel Lods, and Vladimir Bodiansky’s extraordinary legacy from 1935 to 1939 in Clichy, a northwestern Paris suburb. Here they designed and built the Maison du Peuple, the People’s House, the first prefabricated building in France. Lauded for its modularity and sliding partitions, the maison became a national heritage site in 1983 but these days is sorely in need of restoration. To create this work, a response to the maison’s decline, Blais first constructed a scale model of the building with mirrored PMMA blocks, which evoke the modernist metal and glass materials of the Clichy house.

He then made a video, in which the sculpture sits on a stack of travel trunks that emphasize the highly adaptable capacity of the maison. Blais was granted special permission to film on the first floor, the celebrated “salle polyvalente,” a functionally flexible room that was previously used as a cinema and for various events but is now inaccessible to the public. Made in collaboration with Julien Discrit, the video presents sweeping tracking shots that highlight the great versatility of the building, as well as close-ups of the sculpture that capture the disused surroundings mirrored on its surface.

The maison has a ground-level glass-walled room that spans practically the entire length of the building and is regularly utilized for exhibitions. There is where the site-specific project is currently installed, visible from the street only, preferably at night since the video is projected on a wall inside. The sculpture is deposited on palettes, which appear to be the same ones that were used in Blais’s 2011 solo exhibition in an ex-industrial building called the Transpalette in Bourges—an exhibition curated, as this one was, by Jérôme Cotinet-Alphaize. Tautology is often at the heart of Blais’s work, and here it perfectly allows for the hammering of a plea to newly perceive and experience—and save!—this particular place.

— Caroline Hancock

“Une brève histoire des lignes”

CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ
1, parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme
January 11–April 1

Július Koller, Time-Space Defining Psycho-Physical Activity of Material - Tennis (Antihappening), 1968, black-and-white photo, 7 1/2 x 7".

Writing in 1926, Wassily Kandinsky defined “line” as a force that “hurls itself upon the point which is digging its way into the surface, tears it out and pushes it about the surface in one direction or another.” This energetic description, along with illustrations from the didactic illustrated book in which it first appeared, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane), ushers us into the Centre Pompidou Metz’s sweeping investigation of the form and function of line in modern and contemporary art.

Culled from the Pompidou’s permanent collection, the Metz survey boasts an impressive roster of artists whose diverse practices include Land art, animation, performance, sculpture, cartography, photography, and film. Certain unexpected presences benefit from the suggested linear reading more than others. Freeing line from two dimensions, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s temporarily installed 24.5-mile white fabric fence, Running Fence, 1972–76, and Július Koller’s antihappening Time-Space Defining Pyscho-Physical Activity of Material – Tennis, 1968, in which the artist redrew tennis court lines with a chalk dispenser, are convincing examples of conceptual and corporeal linear experiences. Attempts to depict naturally occurring lines, however—whether Dove Allouche’s elegantly drawn lightning bolts or Toni Grand’s sculpture made from a vertically split tree branch—are too facile and ultimately dilute the curatorial focus.

The show’s best moments are straightforward compare-and-contrasts of deceptively simple acts of mark-making, which reveal seemingly infinite stylistic nuance. From Lee Ufan’s delicate repetitive graphite strokes (in the “From Line” series, 1964–82) to Brice Marden’s gestural gouache contours (The muses drawing, 1991–93) to Julije Knifer’s hard-edged bands of thickly applied graphite (untitled [Méandre], 1993–99) to Vera Molnár’s zigzagging black thread installation, the predominantly black-and-white show is delightfully diverse.

— Mara Hoberman

Jockum Nördstrom

LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSÉE D'ART MODERNE (LAM)
1 Allée du Musée
February 16–May 19

Jockum Nordström, Jag var en dålig hund (I Was a Bad Dog), 2012. Collage, aquarelle and graphite on paper, 56 x 44".

Son of an art professor, graduate of the Konstfack (Sweden’s largest art school), and married to painter Karin Mamma Andersson, Jockum Nördstrom is no outsider artist. However, because of his naive-style drawings and collages, he’s often compared to the likes of Henry Darger and Vojislav Jakic. It is fitting, then, that his first museum survey in France is at the LaM, home to the country’s largest public collection of art brut. Spanning eighteen years, this comprehensive exhibition brings together over eighty drawings, collages, and sculptures.

Like Darger’s scrolls, Nördstrom’s works on paper feature a recurring cast of characters in various absurd, often sexualized, scenarios. An early collage, The Final End of Childhood, 2001, suggests an incestuous orgy: A woman kneeling on the dinner table exposes her panties to the viewer while a young girl caresses an older man’s bare bottom. Less racy tableaux such as Human Form Divine, 2010, evoke nineteenth-century French Épinal motifs—popular prints whose simple, cartoonish imagery typically narrates religious or historical events. Rather than being didactic, however, Nördstrom’s collaged watercolor cutouts of farmers, hunters, deer, dogs, sea creatures, and varied vegetation are willfully enigmatic. Similarly perplexing despite their apparent folksy style, his pencil drawings of rural landscapes, nautical scenes, and contemporary cityscapes are characterized by an inconsistent sense of scale, multipoint perspectives, and a hodgepodge of present-day and period fashions.

Meticulously constructed using cardboard scraps and matchboxes, Nordström’s sculptures also blend reality and fantasy, creating a three-dimensional landscape that is both familiar and disorienting. Precise models of functional architecture—including the high-rise apartments where Nordström was raised (The Large Livingroom, 2008) and the hospital where he was born (Lasarett, 2009)—appear abstract and whimsical in the presence of precarious free-form constructions such as Goat, 2011.

— Mara Hoberman