ART CITIES:Paris-Retrouvailles

With the arrival of spring and the hope of reopening, Almine Rech Gallery inParis presents in the group exhibition “Retrouvailles” (Action, finding people from whom we were separated) a selection of new works by Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, Brian Calvin, Alejandro Cardenas, Eric Croes, Kenny Scharf, Claire Tabouret, Thu Van Tran and Tursic & Mille.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s references range across a broad spectrum of art historical precedents, from Monet, Vuillard and Munch in the past to Joe Bradley and Josh Smith in the present. Like his forebears in color painting, Bernadet uses the ways that colors, and their interaction, both activate the senses and allow the viewer to reflect back on the nature of that sensory activation, something which we realize in conditioned by both us and the artist being products of a certain time and place. Back in the 1990s, Brian Calvin began developing a figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style. Landscapes and portraits steeped in his Californian roots dominated this work. Close-up treatment of subjects, highly composed structures, as well  as  luminous colors laid flat endow these large-scale paintings with a  strange temporality. In observing his technique of pictorial economy, one gradually comes to see a type of abstraction in his representation of certain details. They reveal, even greater still, the true finality of his work, reaffirming the primacy of a visual reflection on painting itself and its possibilities. Alejandro Cardenas is an artist known for his surrealist humanoid figures. Before becoming a full-time artist, Cardenas had a successful career as a multimedia artist, working in illustration, graphic design and videography. For over a decade he was the lead textile designer and art director for the fashion brand Proenza Schouler. Cardenas’s new body of work is a personal reflection on the present moment that the artist describes as a time of profound global unrest due to climate change, the ongoing pandemic and the economic and social crisis. Sharing an urge for naturalness and reflection on the materiality of objects as well as the sensation they evoke, Eric Croes cover a wide range of art-historical references, from Monet, Vuillard, and Munch to Joe Bradley and Josh Smith. Through his new selection of wall sculptures in glazed lava stone, Jean-Baptiste Bernadet offers a spectacle that activates our sensory perception. Eric Croes has created a series of bronze and ceramic sculptures developing an aesthetic that is inextricably linked to mythology and the world of the bestiary on both an emotional and a formal level. Affiliated with the East Village Art movement in 1980s New York, Kenny Scharf along with his studio-mates Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, was a pioneer of Contemporary Street Art. His 2021 work “TBD” is an act of pop-surrealism expressed in the interpretation of a shape that we perceive to be almost anthropomorphic. With an ecstatic and swirling composition, and a palette of dazzling colors, Scharf offers an immersive visual experience that is both universal and personal. In her work on paper, “The Last Summer’, Claire Tabouret questions ideas of memory and the relationship to the other. With dark, acidic tones, the artwork depicts the moment of a separation or a reunion. Thu Van Tran arrived in France at the age of two as a refugee. The colonial history between the two countries and her experience of living as a cultural outsider are embedded in her work, which is best described as an encounter between semantics and materials. For instance, Thu Van’s interest in rubber relates to its significance in the colonial exploitation of Vietnam, and the subject is materialised in different guises from stained wall frescos to cast sculptures. Though her presentations tend to be minimalist in form, she brings to the aesthetic experience a sense of historical awareness that is often buried or repressed. Since they began collaborating as a duo in 2000, painters Tursic & Mille have been interrogating the contemporary overload of images and their relation with pictorial representation, questioning their reproduction, circulation and disappearance. Taken out of movies, magazines, media and the enormous repertory of data available on the internet, this boundless source of anonymous, preexisting material is used up and transformed into paintings. With their landscapes, erotica, portraits and abstract compositions, Tursic & Mille blur pre-existing hierarchies between all kinds of images, aiming to go forward with the history and genre of painting as it exists in the 21st century.

Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Front Space, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 17/4-22/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, www.alminerech.com