ART-PRESENTATION:Double Eye Poke

“Double Eye Poke”, is an exhibition dedicated to four major US artists: Lynda Benglis, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman. Freely adapted from a work of Nauman’s, where the violent visual attack evoked in the expression ”better than a poke in the eye” is represented literally and mischievously one-upped.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Archive

The exhibition offers an exploration of different modalities, generally qualified as minimal, post-minimal, or conceptual, all of which are the result of a shared interest in a certain troubling of vision. “Double Eye Poke” brings together works based on the human figure, at times manifest, at others somewhat secret, embodied in time and space, in both spaces of Galerie kamel mennour in Paris. This figure, often fragmented, sometimes even completely abstracted, takes on various forms, from the human face, at once raw material and object of symbolic representation, as with Benglis’s objectifying caresses, to the full body as place and tool of the trial and pleasure of repetition, as with Nauman’s amateur choreography, bordering on the absurd, to the traces and physical prints left by the artist-creator (or the “art worker” in his service), as with the irregular random geometry of LeWitt, to the peers (Donald Judd) and tutelary figures in the history of art who inspire Flavin’s evanescent structures… Now a disenchanted statement “Double Eye Poke” offers a challenge to the being of perception and thought. A challenge in which sensational works reveal themselves to be essentially critical, where the language (and its games) that constitutes them underlines even as it translates the necessity of discovering the invisible at the heart of the visible. Language also specifically qualifies that which was thought to have been outrun: not ”paintings” but rather wall drawings, image-objects, or ceramics. The pictorial reappears right where it was no longer expected. To borrow Hal Foster’s phrase, “What you see is never quite what you see”.

Info: Double Eye Poke, Curating: Béatrice Gross, Galerie Kamel Mennour, 47 rue Saint-André des arts 7 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 27/5-25/6/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com