ART-PRESENTATION: Denis Savary

The work of Denis Savary spans a wide range of media, Drawing, Video, Performance and Sculpture. Savary’s fantastical works fictionalize fragments of art and literature, from Max Ernst to Oskar Kokoschka and Lautréamont. He is considered to be among the most important young Swiss artists. His practice weaves narratives steeped in childhood fantasies and adult phantasmagoria, notably through a vision of exhibition as a domestic place that the spectator can inhabit.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Xippas Gallery Archive

Denis Savary sets up complex systems of references to great poetic effect. Working with fragments of art and literary history, the artist weaves narratives of desire and unrequited love steeped in childhood fantasies and a more adult, contemplative kind of phantasmagoria. The regimen of historical quotation at play is governed by a kind of bibliophilic derive, the aimless drift from one book’s edition to another, a protracted glide from one volume to the one right next to it. Xippas Gallery presents Denis Savary’s third solo exhibition the Gallery and at the same time the artist exhibits at the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris. At Xippas gallery he presents “The relief of an articulated model of house lightning rod that comes in sequences on the wall. All these pieces attest course a taste for architecture, but more generally what drives me now is the issue of housing and its surroundings, say the landscape and comedy”. The artist plays with ordinary situations in order to create a mix of oddity and collective memory. He then confronts the spectator with a narrative infected with a certain mutable and shifting force, which can perhaps only result in questioning the spectator’s point of view and point of reference.  

Info: Xippas Gallery, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 23/1-/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com