ART CITIES:Paris Openings 12/1/19

Amar Kanwar’s solo exhibition features his latest film “Such a Morning” along with seven installations of letters composed of video and light projections on paper. The 85-minute film unlocks a metaphysical response to our contemporary reality as it navigates multiple hallucinations between speech and silence, fear and freedom, democracy and fascism. In “Such a Morning”, a famous mathematician at the peak of his career unexpectedly withdraws from his life and retreats to the wilderness to live in an abandoned train carriage. Creating a zone of darkness so as to acclimatize himself before total darkness descends, the professor begins to live in a realm bereft of light. Thus starts an epic sensory journey into a new plane of emotional resonance between the self and the surrounding world. A parallel story about a woman emerges within the course of the film, providing a compelling, analogous narrative to the protagonist’s. Over time, the professor records his epiphanies and hallucinations in an “almanac of the dark”, an examination of 49 types of darkness that emerge as a series of letters.  The seven Letters presented here contain texts, 17 video projections, 45 light projections. Info: Marian Goodman Galerie, 79 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 12/1-7/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.mariangoodman.com

For more than thirty years, Artur Lescher presents a solid work as a sculptor, which results from a research around the articulation of materials, thoughts and forms. In this sense, the artist has on the particular, uninterrupted and precise dialogue with both architectonic space and design, and on his choice of materials, which can be metal, stone, wood, felt, salts, brass and copper, fundamental elements to highlight the power of this discourse. Artur Lescher continues his poetic investigations, proposing philosophical and scientific debates through his refined way of manipulating matter into forms and constructive procedures that dialogue with the architectural space. For his solo exhibition in his solo exhibition “Asterismos” Lescher presents an installation designed especially for the gallery space, characterized by punctual sculptures, using as its starting point a reflection on the concept of “asterism”, a pattern or set of stars  that, when visible in the sky from the terrestrial plane, composes geometric shapes or recognizable figures; however they are not recognized by the scientific community, as are the constellations. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 12/1-23/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com

Oliver Beer in his solo exhibition “Household Gods” presents a new sound installation and sculptures, which reflects the artist’s current exploration of the relationship between sound and form, and the innate musicality of the physical world. To celebrate the opening of the exhibition, his latest performance “Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me)” will be presented the opening day. The “Household Gods” of the title are physical objects, placed on plinths in a whitened room and idolized to the point where they can sing. In the main space of the gallery, they are given voice and raised to the status of household divinities. Beer uses microphones to amplify the ambient sound ricocheting within the internal spaces of the objects, creating gentle acoustic feedback loops, that allow us to hear the innate sound of each object. These notes are determined by volume and form of empty space, and have remained unchanged since the day each piece was created. Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Marais, 7 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 12/1-16/2/2019, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net

Carole Benzaken’s solo exhibition “Là-bas…Toi”, occupies both gallery spaces of Galerie Nathalie Obadia. At the Bourg-Tibourg gallery, Carole Benzaken presents the series “Greffes”, eight paintings of identical format, in which the chromatic variations shift between acid green and the sweetest of pinks. The subject of the work is hidden by the paint, to the point that it is impossible to recognize it, concealed as it is by the fluctuations in speed. A few vertical lines alone mark the frenetic horizontality, punctuating the artist’s unfettered brushstrokes. Similarly, the series “Au réveil, il était midi”, presented at the Cloître Saint-Merri gallery, challenges our understanding. While we feel like we can perceive trees, houses, walls or a snowy landscape, the succession of frames like windows of hypertextual screens that are superimposed on the crumpled bruises of white paint (teeming with forgotten letters or swarms of birds) foils any attempt at reasoned identification. Info:  Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Rue du bourg Tibourg, 18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg, Paris, Duration: 12/1-23/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00 & Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, Duration: 12/1-23/2/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com

David Douard is without a doubt one of the most unsettling revelations in recent years. His work savagely leaps into the most contradictory of references (poetry, history of science, technology, animism, counterculture, etc.) and he gives them expression through combinations of video, sculpture, collage, sound, and past masterpieces grafted onto interactive installations in order to create allegorical tales that reflect the infectious relationships that manifest between worlds that hoped themselves impermeable to one another. Transforming the exhibition “O’DA’OLDBORIN’GOLD” into a rumor, David Douard proposes to slip into the “diseases of the real”. Composed of viral works generated by a text matrix, the exhibition explores the slow shifts and fractures that haunt us and become hybrid sculptures, mutating scripts, and uncontrollable images. David Douard draws inspiration from the processes of transformation and development at work in our world, making plants, wit, saliva, images, technology or language into tools to reveal the principles of transmission. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, Duration:  12/1-16/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com

Aspasia Krystalla deals creatively with the human figure in its environment of creatural, technical and architectural elements. In large-format black-and-white drawings, she combines fragmentary pictorial elements that she uses as symbols for a narrative story. She creates metaphorical spaces by depicting the elements drawn with fine lines in a cosmos that shifts between reality and dream. It is common knowledge that results are determined by the means employed -a knowledge that is usually underestimated for the sake of image and its lecture. Being aware of this, the artist, in her solo exhibition “Unfamiliar Eden” creates stronger illusions and spatial interconnections between the image, the material and its lecture, through thoughts that spring up and grow from the centre. It is precisely there where one should settle in order to perceive what grows. Info: Bendana|Pinel Art Contemporain, 4 rue du Perche, Paris, Duration: 12/1-16/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.bendana-pinel.com

For her new solo exhibition “Pardon My French”, Dominique Figaella presents paintings done these last two years. They are, as he puts it, a synthesis of his work. Traces, colors and texts are the main elements of this series. Dominique Figarella works on alucore, a metal hard enough to be put down on the floor of his studio, and then become the space in which he is going to live. There is a lot of text in this new series. Dominique Figarella, in very plain writing, paints sentences from memory. The accuracy of the text is not important, but the trace left in his memory. He paints with his whole body. His work, then, will consist in deleting the prints it has left. He will cover each trace very precisely. According to him: “I use these traces singularly. I do not show them, I do not keep them, I use them. And by using them, I destroy them. The title of one of his paintings is “Cosmos, Cosmétique”, a reference to a Greek legend. In the daytime, the gods quarrel and create chaos. But at sunset,  order must be restored. To that end, aristocratic ladies make up before going to bed, hence the word “cosmétique”. Info: Gallery Anne Barrault, 51 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration: 12/1-2/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerieannebarrault.com

What does the future hold for paintings in the prolific world of screens and images? As early as the 1960s, Daniel Dezeuze, a founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group, foresaw this exponential evolution. Since then he has sought to deconstruct the traditional media and materials of painting. Radical to the core, Daniel Dezeuze has used the stretcher as a tool for questioning and reassessing. Freed from the canvas, he flips paintings against the walls, playing with empty spaces and three-dimensionality: by going beyond the limits of artistic traditions, Daniel Dezeuze opens up a new space. In the first part of his new exhibition “Sous un certain angle”, Daniel Dezeuze pays tribute, in his own way, to the art and paintings he loves: angles, brightly coloured frames, open-work surfaces. Presented like the flesh on the bones of the first room, these works drawn in Italy, about Lascaux, the art of fortification and floating geometry, once again evoke the question of angles, open-work and the artist’s obsession with ‘capturing the uncapturable’. Through drawing, Daniel Dezeuze liberates himself of all weight and opens the door to lightness and pleasure: another way of seeing the world from a certain angle. Info: Galerie Templon, 30 Rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 12/1-9/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com

Centralia is a town in Pennsylvania in the United States, abandoned after a fire in a strip mine took hold and has continued to burn, beneath the borough, for several decades. This devastated place serves as the departure point for Pierre Seinturier’s imagination to invite us into a fantasy setting which is nothing but a contrario luxuriance and greenery. The first works in the exhibition “Centralia” welcome the visitor with tight shots of hanging hands opposite a blank surface. The sepia tones and the surrealism of the scenes presented like a storyboard put Seinturier in the position of narrator at the beginning of a dark tale. The gallery’s spaces are then treated as an almost theatrical set, in which a set of panels represent a dense forest of warm colors and strong lines. The sculptures accompanying them take the form of cut tree trunks with a totemic appearance and serve as living spaces for his enigmatic characters and playlets. Info: Galerie George -Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, 36 rue de Seine, Paris, Duration: 12/1-16/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-10:00, www.galerie-vallois.com