picks October 14, 2019

Lauren Coullard

“My work is not in the new, but in reworking history,” Lauren Coullard recently told me at her studio at DOC, the artist residency she cofounded in an abandoned high school building in Paris’s nineteenth arrondissement last year. She also spoke about her painting practice as dealing with “something between the sacred and the profane,” and referenced Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” describing an interest in “hybridity between man and woman, animal and artifice.”

For this solo exhibition in Paris, Coullard borrowed the title and premise of Isaac Asimov’s 1941 science- fiction novella Nightfall

print September 2019

Behjat Sadr

In Le temps suspendu (Time Suspended), Mitra Farahani’s 2006 documentary on the Iranian painter Behjat Sadr, the artist explains that “in painting, you suspend time.” Sadr passed away ten years ago at the age of eighty-five, but in this exhibition, her decades-long practice crystallized in nine oil paintings (one supported by steel struts running from floor to ceiling), seven collages, and four photographs. Her canvases often read as abstractions, but they are squarely grounded in the real: in the materiality of the varied surfaces and the viscosity of oil paint.

As an art student in Italy in

print Summer 2019

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili is after “the sensation of losing boundaries.” This feeling emerges, she explains, in the experience of being a new mother: “when you have a newborn and are breastfeeding and your outlines become unstable and it is hard to say where you end and where the world begins.” This state also informs Alexi-Meskhishvili’s relationship to photography. She has, for instance, devised a process in which the limits between photographic media fade: She begins with 4 x 5" negatives and ends with sharp, color-rich, digitally manipulated archival prints. Likewise, her work dissolves

print May 2019

Gina Pane

In 1963, Gina Pane (1939–1990) graduated from Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where she studied painting and lithography, and quickly became a player in the city’s art scene. This exhibition, “Terre protégée” (Protected Earth), curated by Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin, featured two paintings from this time, Untitled (no 20), 1962–65, and Untitled (no 31), 1962–67, both modestly sized, portrait-oriented works in oil on canvas. Composed of sharp vertical bands or triangles of bold contrasting colors, separated by paler shades or stripes of white, these works, according to

print February 2019

Lucia Laguna

The Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna was once a language teacher. She brings her knowledge of linguistics to the practice of painting, developing the medium’s discursive potential. Her studio, tucked into the hills above Rio de Janeiro, is home to the visual lexicon she deploys in her paintings, her dictionary of images. Laguna has developed a form of conversational collaboration with her studio assistants. Following discussions of subject and color, her collaborators paint the first layer of each small- or large-scale oil or acrylic canvas so that Laguna may formally reply. Davi Baltar and Claudio

print December 2018

Santiago de Paoli

If the first noun in “Peintures et Hotline” (the title of Santiago de Paoli’s first solo exhibition in France) announced the paintings on view, the second referred to a binder of erotic drawings, undisplayed but available for viewing on request. The twenty-one oil paintings—variously on felt, wood, plaster, and ceramic—hung at different heights on the gallery’s white Sheetrock and exposed-masonry perimeter, save for two, Chaussettes à centre libre (Free Center Socks), 2018, which was set leaning against a wall, partially propped up by a stained cork, and Here you are, 2018, which lay

print November 2018

“The Oil of Pardis”

Organized by Hormoz Hematian, founder of Tehran’s Dastan Gallery and Dastan’s Basement, “The Oil of Pardis” drew from a rich vein of modern and contemporary painting in Iran. The title revealed a love for the country (pardis is Persian for “paradise”) and referred to both Iran’s petroleum industry and the chosen medium of many of the artists exhibited here. Sam Samiee, however, works in acrylic. The youngest of this multigenerational group of artists, Samiee contributed Mithra the Crucifier, Cyclonopedia, 2018, a work that combines images of carbon-fuels infrastructure with Zoroastrian symbolism.

print September 2018

Li Shurui

For this exhibition, Li Shurui’s debut solo presentation in Europe, the artist presented ten new paintings and a video, the roughly twenty-four-minute Marriage Certificate, 2018. Her first work in this medium—made with her husband, the musician Li Daiguo—the video weaves together the physical and emotional material of the couple’s relationship with flashes of their creative production. The eight paintings comprising The moment before evaporation, Me Nos. 1–5 and The moment before evaporation, You Nos. 1–3, all 2018, were displayed in level rows across large sheets of paper painted with

print Summer 2018

Younès Rahmoun

“Hijra,” the title of Younès Rahmoun’s most recent exhibition, refers to the departure, in the year 622, of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, the pre-Islamic name of Medina. Hijra—the word means “migration” in Arabic—is an act of faith, an act that looks toward the future. “I think that traveling is a true gift,” the artist said in an interview with curator Jérôme Sans, “whether it is an inner journey or a journey toward the other.” Rahmoun draws strongly on the traditions of Islam in his work, particularly Sufi philosophy. However, it is not only the presence

print May 2018

Olympe Racana-Weiler

Olympe Racana-Weiler announces a gut craving, a physical manifestation of desire and ambition, in the title of her first solo exhibition, “I came back from paradise and I’m frankly hungry.” The phrase also alludes to a return from another realm, a passage that might be a kind of metamorphosis, evocative of Ovid’s compendium of transformation myths. In a published conversation with Jim Dine, with whom she works as a studio assistant, Racana-Weiler tells of her own metamorphosis into a painter, and cites the ancient text. In this context, Racana-Weiler also speaks briefly about dancing as a child.

print April 2018

Alex Cecchetti

An ending is a boundary, a limit. But do all stories end? Alex Cecchetti’s exhibition “Tamam Shud,” part of a larger project including a novel and performances, takes its name from the story of a man found dead on a beach in southern Australia seventy years ago. The body was never identified, and his pocket contained only a scrap of paper that read, “Tamám shud,” an Old Persian phrase meaning, “It is the end.” It may have been torn from the last page of the Rubáiyát of the twelfth-century poet Omar Khayyám. That’s the story Cecchetti tells. He also tells the tale that he himself has died.

The

print December 2017

Ida Ekblad

For years, objects recovered from the streets and sidewalks surrounding the places where Ida Ekblad produces and exhibits her work have found their way into her oeuvre. Here in Paris, her work also opens itself to the perhaps more ephemeral attributes of a certain local form of femininity. In this gallery on the rue du Temple, one found an alluring, exuberant group of six paintings and three sculptures—works sprung from Ekblad’s poem “Step Motherfucker,” the title of which was also the show title. The artist’s rhythmic lines picture a phantasmagoric woman: “She worked in a small art

print November 2017

OPENINGS: ENRIQUE RAMÍREZ

THERE ISN’T A CLOUD IN THE SKY at the beginning of Enrique Ramírez’s video Brises (Breezes), 2008, but the gray-suited actor in the opening shot is drenched, water dripping from his fingertips. The young man walks toward Santiago’s Palacio de la Moneda, the official seat of the Chilean president. He passes two fountains before entering the silent monument, his pace unrelenting. Visitors are meant to exit from the palace onto the Plaza de la Ciudadanía, but the actor pointedly heads in the other, “forbidden” direction. The site itself, where Salvador Allende’s life ended during the 1973 military

print November 2017

Hassan Sharif

Displayed at the top of the stairs leading down to the gallery’s main exhibition space for Hassan Sharif’s “Reading Is Making: Books and Boxes” were copies of three political cartoons that the artist drew in the 1970s. The images speak of the tide of consumerism that began sweeping Sharif’s native United Arab Emirates in the ’60s. In one, a hand reaches up from under a pile of electronic appliances. I'M DROWNING, DROWNING, DROWNING!!! his speech bubble calls out in Arabic. In another, a mustachioed man is pictured on the toilet, surrounded by a discarded mess of books, wearing a Rube Goldberg–type

print September 2017

Tiziana La Melia

Spanning adjacent walls and gently grazing the gallery floor, Tiziana La Melia’s panoramic canvas Broom Emotion, 2017, hung unstretched, like a backdrop to the rest of her eponymous solo exhibition, her first in France. Black arabesques and graffiti-like script emerged from this abstract work, saturated with pools of purple, yellow, pink, and brown—that is, watercolor, red wine, and instant coffee. A thin layer of sand covered the gallery’s terrazzo floor, while ostrich-size chalk eggs and purple sachets of white dragées were arranged atop fragrant bales of hay. A garden arch, covered with

print May 2017

Mohssin Harraki

In his exhibition “Matière grise” (Gray Matter), Mohssin Harraki’s Débat imaginaire (Imaginary Debate), 2017, covered an entire wall with an enlarged fourteenth-century illustration of the twelfth-century Andalusian thinker Averroes in conversation with Porphyry, the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher. Manfredus de Monte Imperiali, working in what is today Italy, originally fixed this imaginary dialogue between the two Mediterranean intellects on parchment, seating the wide-eyed men, clothed in colored robes, in stiffly foreshortened chairs. The phrases in ornate Latin calligraphy that extend

print April 2017

Caroline Mesquita

“I really like when things suddenly go out of control,” French artist Caroline Mesquita has said. Here, she set the scene as a plane crash. Three installations constructed from steel and resin—The Plane Wing, The Plane Sidewall, and The Wing Tip (all works 2017)—stood as parts of an imagined aircraft. Like a stage, each installation was peopled with sculptures made of plates of brass and resin; cut, bent, and welded together, these life-size anthropomorphic figures are composed of tubular and cylindrical shapes. These are the survivors. Although static, their jointed appendages are

print March 2017

Lili Reynaud-Dewar

In 1985, finding that feminism and Marxism had “run aground,” scientist and philosopher Donna Haraway published “A Cyborg Manifesto,” proposing “a creature in a post-gender world.” Arguing for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction,” Haraway asserts that “we are all . . . fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” When French artist, writer, and teacher Lili Reynaud-Dewar arrived in Memphis in 2009 to find billboards advertising “grillz,” she interpreted this practice of adornment as a manifestation of Haraway’s vision

print February 2017

Cathryn Boch

The roar of a sewing machine, the rhythmic clicks of a bobbin changing, the flapping of sheets of paper, and the artist’s focused breath were audible through a single pair of headphones at the center of Cathryn Boch’s recent exhibition “monades.” Played on a loop, this digital recording, Atelier 50’ (all works 2016), documents the soundscape of Boch’s actions and hesitations as she manipulates maritime maps, atlas pages, aerial photographs, paper, and thread. While the title of this sound work attests to its location and duration, all other pieces were left untitled. And each was pinned to the

print December 2016

Lara Almarcegui and Mohamed Namou

A shared concern for the composition of territory was revealed through a visual dialogue between works by eminent Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui and Mohamed Namou, a recent graduate of the École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Such intergenerational pairings are favored by mor charpentier, and in this case, the common vocabulary that emerged from the artists’ concrete conversation enabled a deeper understanding of each practice.

On the ground floor, Almarcegui’s Rocks of Spitzbergen (Svalbard), 2014, plainly listed, in crisp black text on the gallery’s white wall, the range of mineral

Lillian Davies