Guitemie Maldonado

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  print January 2013

  Bojan Šarčević

  Bojan Šarčević’s exhibition “L’ellipse d’ellipse” included twenty-six works retracing his path since 1999, demonstrating the breadth and consistency of his multifarious explorations. Sculpture, collage, construction, installation, and film are among the specific means by which he establishes and comprehends form, its connection with materials, the memories it conveys and situations it evokes, and finally the relationship it maintains with space.

  Works from the past few years greeted the visitor in the first room, where She, 2010, and He, 2011, a pair of large stelae sculpted in onyx, polished on

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  print December 2012

  Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

  The precipitous staircase leading to Galerie Xippas is certainly one of the most astounding bits of architecture among the Marais galleries. From the bottom of the steps, one cannot see the top. Only the light indicates where the landing must be; one could otherwise imagine the staircase to be infinite. On every step, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot had placed large stones—slowing down the visitor’s ascent, prohibiting a direct path or easy balance, calling attention to each footstep. This stairwell, transformed into a mountain path or riverbed and titled chorégraphie (all works 2012), was really

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  print December 2012

  Bruno Botella

  When visiting the exhibition “Oborot,” one is quickly struck by the coherence of the ensemble composed by eight works, all executed this past summer in the gallery itself. Black, white, and gray provide the dominant color scheme and produce a first distancing. The forms and their presentation devices are intriguing, even while seeming familiar; the titles add to the perplexity, whether they sound poetic—for instance Maillon de repli (Pearled Maillon) (all works 2012)—or just strange, like Qotrob or Oborot. If those two works are linked by their sound—and seem to echo the artist’s

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  print November 2012

  Dominique Figarella/Raphael Hefti

  Two distinct perspectives: French artist Dominique Figarella explores painting, its forms, its space, its material possibilities, its accidents as well as its relationship to the image; Raphael Hefti, from Switzerland, looks at the mechanical and chemical processes in the transformation of materials, such as glass, metal, and even photographic paper—processes whose effects he assembles, not only when they are successful but above all when they fail. To see the canvases of the one artist alongside the glass panels or iridescent steel bar of the other calls up reflections relating to current

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  print April 2012

  Joachim Koester

  What stuck with you from Joachim Koester’s exhibition “Of Spirits and Empty Spaces” was primarily the powerful memory of its atmosphere, of a progression through darkness, from one black-and-white projection to another, with passages through light and color for his photographic works. Above all, you were left with the impression of having plunged into a remarkably coherent yet varied universe without any trace of monotony. The twenty-one pieces in the show date from 2003 to 2011, some having been produced for the occasion. All reflect the artist’s method of combining documentary and fiction and

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  print March 2012

  Stéphane Bordarier

  In the nine untitled works presented here, all from 2010 and 2011, Stéphane Bordarier pursues the exploration of painting—more specifically, of color—that he began in the early 1980s and has since steadily deepened. As in the past, he works on his canvases flat, spreading out the paint with the aid of spatulas or scrapers over a base of wet rabbit-skin glue, the drying time of which determines the duration of the piece’s execution—a few hours at most. During this process, the color not only attaches itself to the support but also acquires, as it mixes with the glue, a material

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  print March 2011

  Arman

  The trajectory of Arman’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou (now on view at the Tinguely Museum in Basel) was thematic, showing the artist’s pursuit of certain operational modes between the 1950s and the ’90s, and also the recurrence of several types of object; his production does not comply with common schemas of linear development or fall into distinct periods. Nevertheless, curator Jean-Michel Bouhous’s exhibition of 120 works imposed a visibly circular movement on his career: from painting to objects and back.

  Arman, who was born in 1928 in Nice and died in 2006, came onto the artistic

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  print March 2011

  Eric Poitevin

  All photography is a montage,” says Eric Poitevin. And, one might have been tempted to add upon leaving his recent show at the Galerie Nelson-Freeman, so is every exhibition: increasingly vertiginous, allowing one to envision infinite possibilities of reconfiguration, but also to appreciate the choices made by the artist. The presentation of the works on this occasion encouraged this impression: Poitevin undertook different strategies on each of the gallery’s two floors. Upstairs, five views of undergrowth were hung opposite two black-and-white diptychs of trees in winter. Chromatic richness

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  print February 2011

  Bernard Piffaretti

  Although Bernard Piffaretti’s painting defies all periodization from the point of view of style or evolution, it continues to unfurl over time, to the rhythm of a story that writes itself as it goes along; moreover, the activity of observing the completed works is an integral part of the creation of this ongoing tale. At Bâtiment Trafic, an industrial building transformed into an art center, paintings and drawings made between 2007 and 2010 could be seen in another light, as they played with the sun’s rays and entered into dialogue with the architecture and with one another. Upstairs, the

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  print January 2011

  Rainier Lericolais

  Sixty works dated from 1992 to the present, some made specifically for this exhibition, offer a survey of the visual work of Rainier Lericolais, who is both an artist and a musician—a creator, one might say, of curiosities. Though he uses humble materials and rudimentary or somewhat outmoded techniques, he nevertheless produces singular, bizarre objects that are able both to surprise and to confound viewers. He has, for instance, attempted to “cast” both water and explosions. For the series “Tentative de moulage d’eau” (Attempt to Cast Water), 2009, the artist poured hot paraffin onto water.

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  previews January 2011

  François Morellet

  To be given a full retrospective at the Centre Pompidou during one’s lifetime is a perilous prospect, however flattering. Yet such weight does not encumber François Morellet, the great figure in postwar French geometric abstraction, who a few years back foiled a supposedly career-spanning show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris by presenting only works from 1952 alongside enlarged replicas fabricated for the show.

  To be given a full retrospective at the Centre Pompidou during one’s lifetime is a perilous prospect, however flattering. Yet such weight does not encumber François Morellet, the great figure in postwar French geometric abstraction, who a few years back foiled a supposedly career-spanning show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris by presenting only works from 1952 alongside enlarged replicas fabricated for the show. At the Pompidou, however, the intervening years will be represented at last, as the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV)

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  print Summer 2010

  Dominique Figarella

  This exhibition, composed of forty-seven paintings made between 1992 and 2010, proposed neither a linear nor a chronological path through the work of Dominique Figarella. The challenge to interpretation was raised at the entrance, in the form of a small wooden panel covered entirely in pink chewing gum, stretched and stuck in every direction. Untitled, 2006, greeted the visitor by evoking the myriad directions of Figarella’s practice—the evocations of the body through metaphors of skin and mastication, as well as the questions raised by modernist composition, here in the guise of the Greenbergian