print December 2014

Laure Prouvost

Smeared with mud, Laure Prouvost’s letter of invitation for her exhibition “This is the visit” announced a tea party and an evening of “fond- razing” for her Grand Dad, described elsewhere as “a very close friend of Kurt Schwitters” who is still lost in the tunnel he’s been digging to Africa from his ramshackle cabin in England’s Lake District. At the opening, a waiter cheerfully offered “thé à la gin” in floral flea-market china—tepid Earl Gray spiked with booze. The works were linked by a low, dark-brown platform, a kind of stage for the viewer to walk on. An early video, Burrow Me, 2009,

print November 2014

Lee Ufan

This summer, for the annual exhibition of contemporary art in Louis XIV’s gilded Château de Versailles and the surrounding formal gardens of André Le Nôtre, South Korean artist Lee Ufan installed a group of ten new sculptures from his “Relatum” series, which began in the late ’1960s, complementing the marriage of regal symmetry and natural beauty that defines the work of the seventeenth-century landscape architect. Relatum—The Arch of Versailles (all works 2014), a chromatically neutral rainbow fashioned from a band of stainless steel some fifty feet long, marks the passage from the mirrored

print September 2014

Enrique Ramírez

For his first solo exhibition in France, “Cartografías para navegantes de tierra” (Cartographies for Navigators of the Earth), Enrique Ramírez, a Chilean artist based in Santiago and Paris, presented work that navigates the vast distances in between. Nearly all the works featured Ramírez’s writing—prayerlike Spanish prose—often set to the rhythm of waves.

La invención de América (The Invention of America), 2013, a Dacron sail made by the artist’s father and a separately framed text, functioned as a central icon. Inverting the worn triangular piece of material and containing it within

print Summer 2014

Julien Crépieux

A choreographed lightness radiated from Julien Crépieux’s “Corpusculum Flotans.” The exhibition title, suggesting small, floating bodies, shares that of a 2005 video work by the artist—a short meditation on passing clouds that is also a record of the eye looking toward the sky. Here, again, in a body of new work, Crépieux showed his concern with movement, not only in the visible world but in the mechanisms of its reception: the eye, the lens, and the captured image. Working in video, installation, and, increasingly, the two-dimensional techniques of collage and photography, Crépieux

print February 2014

Sophie Calle

“What do you see?” To staff and visitors of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where more than a dozen objects and works of art were stolen in March 1990, Sophie Calle recently posed this simple question. Gardner’s will stipulates that the arrangement of works in her namesake museum’s galleries never be altered, so for several years after the theft, patches of bare, silk-covered walls punctuated the collection. As early as one year after the theft, Calle included remembrances of works missing from this Boston institution in her series “Last Seen,” 1991. A few years later, the museum rehung

print October 2013

Joëlle de La Casinière

For Joëlle de La Casinière’s first exhibition in the French capital since the early 1980s, thirty-five “tablotins”—the nomadic artist’s term for her small-scale image-and-text-infused single-sheet collages that make up the pages of her “impossible book”—were accompanied by works for radio and television that she produced with the collective she co-founded in 1972, Montfaucon Research Center. According to the artist, each tablotin provides a “cacophony of information,” defying narrative. Over the past forty years, de La Casinière has produced more than four hundred of them, filling each

print Summer 2012

Bayrol Jimenez

In early 2012, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris opened “Resisting the Present: Mexico 2000/2012,” an unexpected selection of work by young Mexican artists that narrowly, although knowingly and playfully, skirted clichéd representations of the country. A skewed idea of Mexico has become commonplace in France, particularly in the wake of the trial of Florence Cassez, a Frenchwoman accused of complicity with a Mexican kidnapping gang. The exhibition included a large-scale wall drawing in mostly red acrylic by Bayrol Jimenez (based in Oaxaca, Mexico, he was a resident at La Cité

print March 2012

Mark Geffriaud

Mark Geffriaud triggered an explosion of references with the extremely long title of his exhibition, which, in its abbreviated version, reads, “All that is said is true, all the time, all the time . . . on October 26th.” Its opening lines were appropriated from a poem by musician and performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, to which Geffriaud appended the announcement of the French release date of Marie Losier’s 2011 film about him, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, which documents P-Orridge’s and his second wife Lady Jaye’s manipulation of their bodies in order to become a single “

print February 2012

Guillaume Leblon

Covering the floor of this private foundation’s neat L-shaped space with twenty smooth sheets of fine, sand-colored linen, Guillaume Leblon, for the first time, positioned his sculptures in relation to a traditional painterly platform. The presentation of seven new and recent works, united by this common backdrop as a single textured and permeable composition, echoes the construction of the exhibition’s title work, Black Apple Falls, 2009–11. For this sculpture, punctuated by a darkened piece of fruit suspended from the ceiling by a thick piece of rope, Leblon arranged a series of objects across

print December 2011

Alexandre Singh

The 2006 film based on British novelist Christopher Priest’s book The Prestige (1995) identifies three key moments of a magic trick: the pledge, when an object is presented; the “turn,” when that object is “disappeared”; and the prestige, the moment it reappears—the quarter drawn from a child’s ear, the rabbit pulled out of a hat. Palais de Tokyo director Marc-Olivier Wahler asked artist Alexandre Singh, versed in storytelling and performance, to consider the first of these, the magician’s pledge, for the September 2011 issue of the institution’s magazine, PALAIS/. Granted carte blanche,

print Summer 2011

Thu Van Tran

La Tache, the French translation of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain (2000), a gripping confrontation of race, religion, academia, and the Vietnam War in late-twentieth-century America, provided the title and starting point for Vietnamese-born artist Thu Van Tran’s exhibition of sculpture, drawing, and installation. Addressing French colonialism, the Catholic Church’s mission in Southeast Asia, the rubber trade, and the Vietnam War, as well as American Minimalism, Tran introduced a myriad of moral and political conflicts similar to those engaged by Roth. Tran did not distill her concerns into

print May 2011

Bruno Peinado

Half a century after the beginnings of Pop art, French artist Bruno Peinado has reenergized the punchy midcentury aesthetic, complicating it with visual play and verbal pun. In an interview with Patrice Joly, published in the catalogue accompanying “Casino Incaos,” Peinado’s exhibition last year at Casino Luxembourg, the artist is clear that he “was interested in Pop not because [he] wanted to make neo-Pop Art, but because the world was displaying this great interest in the notion of popular culture.” In the original French version of their conversation, Peinado refers to la notion du populaire

Lillian Davies