ART CITIES:Paris-John M Armleder
Known for an aesthetic that is distinguished by the absence of a characteristic style, John M Armleder’s work spans several different mediums, ranging from painting and sculpture to design, performance, and installation, and is loosely connected by a non-hierarchical and democratic understanding of art based on the themes of appropriation, humor, and chance.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
John M Armleder’s solo exhibition is on presentation at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, among the works on display is a new series of “Puddles Paintings”. John Armleder a singular figure in postwar art. His career synthesizes many of the competing aesthetic developments associated with that period. Such productive friction animates his earliest work with the Groupe Ecart in Switzerland, his many projects informed by his association with the Fluxus Movement, and his interest in John Cage’s work in particular. Moreover, his groundbreaking approach to painting incorporates elements of sculpture, installation, design, performance, and radical conceptual provocation. That he has been able to operate on so many fronts at once, approaching each exhibition as an uncompromising and often unpredictable work in and of itself, has made him a seminal artist of his generation worldwide and one of the defining and most characteristic voices in Swiss art since World War II. Armleder’s formative intersection with Fluxus places chance at the center of his work. In his paintings, installations, and exhibition design practices, he leaves space for unexpected juxtapositions so that his own aesthetic and philosophical positions appear to be constantly on the move. At the same time, he has developed a signature vocabulary and sense of humor that make his work unmistakably his own. Each of these elements play a role in the current exhibition, which will feature an immersive array of wall paintings, several types of paintings on canvas, and installation-based gestures made in response to the overall effect produced by the other objects. His “Puddles Paintings” are made by spilling various materials directly onto the canvas (acrylic paint. They emerge from a double random rule: first, the application onto the medium is not controlled by a movement of artistic mastery, and second, the mixing of elements causes chemical changes in their original properties, both chromatically and physically. In addition, application of the painting materials is performed flat (unlike the “Pour Paintings”, the first examples of which date back to the 1970s), and verticalization of the result, once the layers have formed, further deeply modifies the paintings’ appearance. New pleats form, iridescent grooves emerge through a layer previously covered in uncanny chromatic waves; sometimes even, “bubbles” formed on the surface suddenly burst and spill out a magma of variable density components over the surrounding accretions.
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 6/6-28/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
