ART CITIES:Paris, Openings 7-9/3/19

Combining the laboratory and the studio, chemical experiments and performances, Hicham Berrada creates a personal universe that plays on the codes and protocols of the experimental approach he adopts. The guiding principle of Hicham Berrada’s solo exhibition “Activations” at  the galerie kamel mennour, is to make forms emerge, encourage them to appear rather than represent them. Hicham Berrada defines his practice as that of an energy director (in the sense one speaks of a stage director), whose creative gesture consists in a choice of physical and chemical parameters: to act on the temperature, the light, or the viscosity of an environment, so that, within a defined frame, something is produced. Info : Galerie kamel mennour Gallery, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 7/3-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com

The group exhibition “au-delà, on the edge of the visible and the invisible” is on presentation at Christian Berst Gallery-Art Brut. The artists that are on presentation always maintained a rich dialogue with the invisible. These intercessors would, in this way, give form to that which was “beyond,” beyond life, beyond the world of men, beyond time, beyond meaning. And this form would end up taking on the most sacred character possible, making it impossible to tell if such a work was more a part of the answer or the question. Unless the two are forever intertwined. These cosmogonic or religious aspirations essentially came, however, from collective mythologies. Yet modern societies have since allowed for the emergence of artists liberated from certain normative constraints. This, as individuals are emancipated, all the more so when they are inhabited by a feverish alterity. Brut artists are made of this metal alloy, from which the most fascinating individual mythologies possible get forged. Whatever their motivations may be, the elsewhere that they call forth, that they interpret, requires new languages, new forms, new laws. They know full well that in order to reach what is beyond us, one must go beyond the self, beyond reason itself. Info: Christian Berst Gallery-Art Brut, 3-5, passage des Gravilliers, Paris, Duration: 7/3-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, www.christianberst.com

Through her drawings, paintings and fabric installations, the Franco-Swiss artist Vidya Gastaldon nurtures a protean aesthetic, both humble and psychedelic, claiming a form of simplicity and economy of means. Her recent series of paintings in her solo exhibition “Home-painted objects by the fireplace” is the best illustration of her approach. An assiduous visitor of Emmaus and Caritas charity centers, she recovers, adopts and repaints forgotten canvases of Sunday painters, bringing new life to them and reintroducing them into the circuit of a possible perspective. Between ecological thinking and esotericism (reincarnation, transmigration of souls), Vidya Gastaldon juggles with a plurality of spiritual and artistic references – borrowing from art history as well as from pop culture, Hindu deities and Biblical stories – always with much distance and an undeniable sense of humor. Info: ART: Concept, 4 passage Sainte-Avoye, Paris, Duration: 8/3-6/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerieartconcept.com

The new series of paintings and drawings comprising Brian Calvin’s solo exhibition “Fugue” is on presentation at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris —The names of John Wesley and William Copley, two painters of the last century exposed to the tail end of surrealism and early days of Pop Art, provide some background about the highly diverse inspiration of his painting, which is actually very difficult to pigeonhole. To these, one could easily add the names Piero della Francesca, Matisse, Philip Guston, Balthus, Alice Neel and Mondrian. Both figurative and abstract, Brian Calvin’s painting clearly expresses his desire to be neither one nor the other, but rather both at the same time. His multiple pictorial strategies borrow from the history of both in equal measure, with references to markedly varied pictorial currents: in truth, it borrows from the entire history of painting or, at the very least, from its true inventors. Calvin’s painting is the kind that is looking for solutions. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 9/3-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com

Robert Breer’s solo exhibition “Order From Chaos That Includes Chaos”, is dedicated to the artist’s own implicit vision of goodwill in a society of free and contrary individuals. The title of the exhibition is from the text “Alphabeta” in which Breer examines his place in the world, his fragmentary sense of reality, and his relationships to others. For Breer, “Life keeps going but sideways, not necessarily ahead… It’s a disillusion to think you are getting anywhere”. Breer’s entire oeuvre takes others into account, calls on every element of our conscious and unconscious, and tests the limits of our perception. Order From Chaos That Includes Chaos underscores this social aspect of the work, as much when it focuses on the individual and the personal as when it is projected onto the broader society.  Info: gb agency Gallery, 18, rue des 4 fils, Paris, Duration: 9/3-4/5/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, www.gbagency.fr

“SURFACE” is  Manuela Marques’ new solo exhibition with an original set of photographs and one video. The images she shows today are there to be seen, but the viewer has the feeling no to be able to see below on the surface. During a whole year, Manuela Marques worked in closed rooms of the Château de Versailles. Counter to the Hall of Mirrors, here the mirrors reflect their own history, scratches, dust; everything is printed for the one who can decipher their messages. Manuel Marques initiates a mise en abyme of reality, composing it again and again, until this alchemical porosity between what is exogenous and endogenous emerges. From there, from these images, which are meant to be fixed, you are induced to move among them, to step into them. “Images are abysses” Manuela Marques says. But you do not go out of an abyss, you get lost in it. And indeed, you are confronted with these impossible issues. Everything, absolutely everything, only takes you to impasses, flouting what is inside as well what is outside. Info: Gallery Anne Barrault, 51 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration: 9/3-13/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerieannebarrault.com

Thierry Lagalla’s solo exhibition “Lorsque les peintres arrivèrent sur place, il était malheureusement trop tard” is on presentation at the  Galerie Thomas Bernard: Cortex Athletico. A visual artist and folkloric video artist, Thierry Lagalla,  displays himself, exhibits himself, produces himself, manifests himself, risks himself in video staging, all funnier and more stupefying than the other. One can say that Lagalla works along the same lines as Pierrick Sorin, Joël Bartoloméo and Serge Comte. But beware, because Tilo Lagalla manages in an incongruous way to evacuate the sacrosanct Duchampian fantasy that haunts without hiding the corridors of contemporary art. Varied, or more precisely heterogeneous, Thierry Lagalla makes opposites agreeable: anecdotal/historical, prosaic/ poetic, figuration/abstraction, local/international, etc. A burlesque artwork, like a mooing cow box, acts in reverse and lets us hear, through the holes made in reality, the deepest mooing ripped from nature. Lagalla produces a real world created by the mind that invades the world of things, a truly hospitable service for ambivalence, not antithesis or succession. Info: Galerie Thomas Bernard: Cortex Athletico, 13 Rue des Arquebusiers, Paris, Duration: 9/3-20/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:30-19:00, www.galeriethomasbernard.com

Florian Mermin presents her solo exhibition “Caress of the Forest (the night you left me)”.  In the universe Florian Mermin has created, spiders’ legs end in pointed nails, benches bristle with spikes and tree trunks are covered in hairs. In short, everything is subjected to transformation. Dishes, a screen, pegs, flowerpots and curtains form a setting that is both indoors and outdoors, evoking interior design and the cinema – plenty of films spring to mind on viewing it. For although the objects could possibly be functional, what they are primarily doing is playing a role, creating a familiar mood, romantic or horrific, now sympathetic and now unsettling, compelling or repellent, or – often – all at the same time. It is unsurprising that some people associate them with personal memories, from childhood for instance, or with literary reminiscences, necessarily poetic in nature. Info: Backslash Gallerym 29 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, Paris, Duration 9/3-11/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, www.backslashgallery.com