ART-REVIEW:Group Exhibition at Galerie Kammel Menour

Although the artistic year in Paris began moderately in September, because both the Galleries and the Museums are preparing the inaugurations for their most important exhibitions and collaborations during the period of FIAC 218 (October18-21), there are Galleries like Kammel Menour’s, where the quality of their exhibitions, works and artists is unquestionable. Alicja Kwade, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Douglas Gordon, Latifa Echakhch, Jannis Kounellis, Claude Lévêque. Six artists from different generations and with different stimuli but with common visual language, coexist in the two levels of the really amazing space at 6, rue du Pont de Lodi. Through sculpture, painting, installations and video, the group exhibition is mirroring reality with ultimate truth! It’s an exhibition that seems to be disconnected from the names of the artists and through a new puzzle of artworks, names and materials, a new stritch of icons is created that becomes magical with the help of space. “Transformer” (2018) by Alicja Kwade is so close withPier Paolo Calzolari’s works, but this time Calzolari is surprising us with “Rideaux” (2017), tender-sensitive and fully destimatized. What if the video work “Partition pour Mains et Masse” (2018) refers to Gordon Douglas, is by Latifa Echakhch, since Gordon Douglas exorcises his own ghosts in the ultimate white colour  in “Ghost of Summer” (2018). The differences, the contradictions but also the dialogue between the artworks is clear but very interesting at the lower level of the Gallery, in Claude Lévêque’s “Double Manège” (2003)  and “Untitled (4-parts)” (1987-88) by Jannis Kounellis, because the neon light circles and the material-immaterial relationship that is created in Lévêque’s work is harmoniously complemented by the monumental work of Jannis Kounellis that the volume, the forms and the materials of his works are breathtaking (!)-Efi Michalarou