Lillian Davies

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  print Summer 2022

  Allora & Calzadilla

  During the fifteenth-century age of exploration, European sailors believed in a mythic island called “Antillia,” rumored to be somewhere in the Atlantic, just beyond the edge of existing maps. Conjuring this terra incognita, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s exhibition “Antille” examined the transatlantic ties that inspired French Surrealists. The installation Graft, 2021, blanketed the gallery floor with thousands of handpainted flowers, cast from recycled polyvinyl and modeled after the blooms of roble trees. Their pale crepuscular pink struck a sharp contrast to the high-noon yellow

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  picks May 18, 2022

  “Between your eyes and the images I see (a sentimental choice)”

  Nine drooping tulips, languidly rendered by Elené Shatberashvili in Flowers, 2021–22, announce the nine young artists gathered here. All oil painters and recent graduates of Paris’s Beaux-Arts, this circle of friends shares a concern for living bodies and the landscapes, mythologies, and late-night clubs they move through. Each artist is represented by a single work in addition to a small curiosity cabinet filled with sketchbooks and reference materials, providing a peek inside the emerging ateliers of Paris.
   
  Madeleine Roger-Lacan’s teardrop-shaped canvas, Baûbo – mon sexe est mon coeur (Baûbo
  
  

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  print May 2022

  Judit Reigl

  I asked a young painter to join me on my first visit to this survey of five decades of Judit Reigl’s work. Though my friend’s art jumps between figuration and blankets of monochrome color, she was surprised that the large gestural canvases hung in the street-facing space of Kamel Mennour’s newest gallery had been made by the same artist as the series of small abstractions that lined a long hallway and the large, cleanly figurative compositions presented in two white rooms at the very end. This sense of surprise is common in encounters with Reigl’s work.

  In telling the story of her escape from

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  picks March 30, 2022

  Hoda Kashiha

  Hoda Kashiha’s first institutional exhibition in Europe takes its name from her recent series “I’m Here, I’m Not Here,” 2020–21. Developed across four canvases, the work repeats a motif pulled from an American postcard: a cartoonish rendition of a blonde girl in a pink top holding a daisy. The artist depicts the full figure just once. With each repetition, she obscures the appropriated form with swatches of red and black vinyl, ultimately draining it of all color in a cut-out version in white on white.

  At the heart of this show is “In appreciation of Blinking,” 2021: eight large-scale paintings

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  picks March 24, 2022

  Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Juana Francés

  The two painters in “Resurgent Light” may have never met, but they were both living in Paris in the early 1950s. Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) had arrived there from Lisbon in 1928 to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere, ultimately making her home in the French capital as a political exile. In 1951, Juana Francés (1924-1990), who would later become the only female founding member of the Spanish avant-garde group El Paso, traveled to Paris for one year on scholarship from the French government. For both artists, Paris was a place of refuge from the dictatorships that ruled

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  print February 2022

  Christine Safa

  On fourteen linen canvases, some stretched as wide as a picture window, others small enough to slip into the palm of your hand, Christine Safa had painted landscape and figurative imagery. Dreamlike in their disorienting oscillations of scale and approach, Safa’s compositions are ones in which a mountain can become a forehead, the crook of a shoulder a valley, a shadow the sea. Her works are titled with lines from her poems or from things she’s read, the proximity of word and image echoing the intimacy she creates between geography and the human figure.

  In Safa’s poetry and canvases, the catalyst

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  print December 2021

  “Face à Arcimboldo”

  The face was material for Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593). He molded it—with a singularity of style and those tiny careful brushstrokes in oil—into allegories, bouquets, and arrangements of leather-bound books. Among the many charming examples of the Hapsburg court painter’s work in “Face à Arcimboldo” (Arcimboldo Face to Face)—an exhibition conceived in a dialogue between Maurizio Cattelan and Chiara Parisi, the latter of whom is director of Centre Pompidou-Metz and cocurator of the exhibition with Anne Horvath—was a copy of his lost original, La bibliothécaire (The Librarian), ca. 1566. The

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  picks October 18, 2021

  Louise Bonnet

  For “Bathers,” her first solo exhibition in France, Louise Bonnet has unveiled seven new paintings in oil. In lieu of the breast milk that features in some of her recent work, water, rendered across calm surfaces of deep green and pale turquoise, appears in every canvas, transporting Bonnet’s compositions to the realm of classical myth.

  Bonnet’s primary reference here is Rubens, especially the pink and blue tones of his robust seventeenth-century nudes, but she’s also a practiced hand at illustration and a longtime fan of E. C. Segar’s Popeye. Once a Depression-era boon to spinach farmers, the

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  print October 2021

  Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann

  “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” wrote Virginia Woolf, one of the figures in Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann’s feminist genealogy. Nearly one hundred years after A Room of One’s Own was published, in her exhibition “As if a house should be conceived for the pleasure of the eye, she says,” the artist proposed a mode of exploration—through cinema, sculpture, and design—of just what that room might resemble. A door is essential. Here Badaut Haussmann gave us two of them, heavy interior models, presented leaning against a gallery wall, positioned like sentries.

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  picks September 14, 2021

  GaHee Park

  There is a bouquet of flowers in many of the eleven oil paintings in GaHee Park’s first solo show in France. The eleven colored-pencil drawings tantalize with glimpses of an affair, just as lush, between a dark-haired woman and her smooth blond lover.

  In material and palette, Park’s rendering of flesh—embodied in amorous nudes, fruits and flowers—is decadent. Her succulent lexicon of grapes, cherries, strawberries, and a peach draws insects into almost every composition. In Drunken Lovers with Ants (all works 2021), a line of tiny carpenters snakes across a white tablecloth, while fireflies light

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  picks August 12, 2021

  Merlin Carpenter

  Industrial farmlands line this stretch of heavily traveled highway, a key artery in the European supply chain where a former synagogue, built, famously, at the height of the Dreyfus affair, sits quietly next to the village’s town hall. Lacking a congregation, the space was repurposed as an exhibition hall in 1993, becoming a site of art-world pilgrimage. Out front, Merlin Carpenter has parked a brand-new, bright-red forklift and positioned its metal risers as if to hook on to the temple’s arches and pull the structure right out of the ground. The gesture is playful, if not aggressive in its

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  picks July 20, 2021

  “When our eyes touch”

  “When our eyes touch,” Jacques Derrida mused, “the question will always be whether they are stroking or striking each other.” This quote supplies the title for the first in a series of exhibitions curated by Satu Herrala and Hans Rosenström titled “A I S T I T,” meaning “senses” in their native Finnish. Needless to say, the Covid pandemic, which began shortly after this project was in motion, has thoroughly upended our relationship with this primary sense.

  Inside Louis Carré’s former residence, built by Alvar Aalto in 1959 on a hillside property in a bucolic village not far from Paris, visitors