ART NEWS: Jan.01

Matta presents his solo exhibition “Getting out of the tunnel”. The artist asks “What is living intensely?” You can recognize a way of thinking issued from the twentieth avant-gardes, all the aesthetic revolutions, which advocated going beyond art for the benefice of the emancipation of self and/or of society. You rarely hear such views today in the comments of an exhibition. Situationism – to live in the present time, like a work in itself- seems an outdated and fusty concept in a world where what is urgent is different. Potlatch and pure expenses are no longer relevant. The time is no longer for intensity but for slowing down and decrease. Ramuntcho Matta was born in Paris in 1960. He lives and works in Paris and in Epaux-Bézu. Ramuntcho Matta’s artistic career begins in the late seventies with music. Beyond his work as a composer, he already resorts to the plastic arts in order to formulate his questionings, odd and complex subjects of creation, sometimes using sounds, drawings, videos, space, words or combinations. Info: Galerie Anne Barrault, 51 rue des Archives, Paris, France Duration: 9/12/2021-30/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://galerieannebarrault.com

The exhibition “7 jours 7 nuits” will present, for the first time ever, the installation “7 nuits”, which Sarkis considers as one of the most important works of his career. Realized between 2016 and 2019, it takes the shape of 7 distinct compositions, with each interpretation comprising three elements that vary from one grouping to another. Each is rounded out by a photographic print on fabric (140 x 210 cm – 55 1/8 x 82 in.), showing a sleeping bag in front of La grande vitrine (1982-2021), an installation in progress situated at the heart of the artist’s studio. On the ground, next to the sleeping bag, a small oil painting on canvas (18 x 24 cm – 6 3/32 x 9 1/4 in.) and a photograph on paper in the same format are the finishing touches of the photographic mise-en-scène. The latter is slightly different from one shot to the next, as evidenced by the modified assemblages and the changing luminosity of the studio. The small painted canvas and the photograph on paper act as wall labels in the exhibition, inviting us to appreciate the sheer spatiality and power of the large photograph on fabric. The small photographs refer to the pictures taken by Sarkis, in which memories of interior details, objects and curiosities linked to precise locations cohabitate. The oils on canvas emanate from these photographs. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 Rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 5-12/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com

The photographic work of Matthew Brandt and Adi Nes, each with a unique approach to portraiture is on show at the exhibition “The Moment of Truth”. Matthew Brandt’s approach to portrait photography is process-driven, utilizing other media such as sculpture, painting, metalwork, and printmaking, bypassing the definitive moment of photography in his own notable way. Through different series Adi Nes draws the daily life of characters composing the social and cultural structure of a nation, from the most modest worker to the brigand, the craftsman, the soldier, the teenager or the elder, a mosaic of portraits re-imagined with exceptional acuity. Reminiscent of Renaissance or Baroque paintings often based on parables and collective cultural memory, his photographs are not only a portrait of culture but strive to reveal a universal humanism in the ongoing drama of life. Info: Praz-Delavallade Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 8/1-12/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat  11:00-18:00, www.praz-delavallade.com

After a two-year absence, unconventional artist Oda Jaune is back, offering a Paris transformed by the pandemic “wOnderlust”, a powerful, dazzling new exhibition centring on a 10-metre-long canvas and a life-sized hologram. The canvases, water colors and hologram together map out a fabulous journey, veering between the magical and the monstrous. Her distinctive work, unshackled by convention, is part of the spectacular renaissance of figurative painting in France. Poetic, tortured, sometimes erotic or even unaffectedly feminist, her painting uninhibitedly explores the depths of the unconscious. The recent health crisis and forced isolation led the artist to reexamine the evolution of the human race and its shifting relationship with the world. As she explains, “After a year of the pandemic, I’m fascinated by the idea of the transformation of human beings and of nature into someone or something that is always new. Info: Galerie Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, France, Duration: 8/1-5/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com

The exhibition “Lucy & Fengyi” marks the first time Lucy Bull and Guo Fengyi have been shown together, and illuminates formal, material, and cross-cultural correspondences between artists who hail from different generations and different parts of the globe. Because their pictures emerge from transpersonal ideas about—and experiences of—internal and external perception, the distances that separate their ages and their countries of origin are in fact smaller than they might seem; indeed, the art of Bull and Guo alike draws from direct sensory participation in the living present, and posits that artmaking emerges as a response to constantly shifting inner and outer realities.What Guo and Bull share, then, is an abiding faith in a picture-making force that resides not in the artist, viewer, or artwork alone, but somewhere between them. This force is activated only when certain conditions are met, and so the artist operates not only as a visionary or a technician, to name only the extremes of a range of roles the artist can inhabit, but also as a conductor who ensures that the necessary elements come into relation, including imagistic and gestural motifs, symbolic associations, and color-based relationships. Info: Pond Society, No.2555-4 Longteng Ave, Xuhui District, Shanghai, Shanghai, Duration: 9/1-20/2/2022, Days & Hours: Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, ncartfoundation.org

“Disruption: Works from the Vicki and Kent Logan Collection” presents about 50 artworks including paintings, sculptures, photographs, mixed-media works, and several artworks never before displayed at the the Denver Art Museum. This collection features many works by noted North American and international contemporary artists.The works of the exhibition question the past, the world today, and the social spaces we navigate—upending political narratives, questioning our rights of freedom and access, subverting notions of identity, contesting social norms, critiquing consumer culture, and imagining dystopian alternate realities. The exhibitiondraws contemporary stories and narratives from the collection built from this dynamic partnership with the Logans, and also adds four loans from their private collection. Collectively these artworks interrupt expectations and unsettle conventions, inviting visitors to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which artists challenge norms and push boundaries through disruptive actions. Info: Curator: Laura F. Almeida, Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Pkwy, Denver, CO, USA, Duration: 16/1-31/12/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, Tue 10:00-21:00, www.denverartmuseum.org

Patrick Faigenbaum’s solo exhibition “Faigenbaum Photographies, 1974-2020” is like a retrospective. In July 1974, Patrick Faigenbaum was 20 years old. He was walking around the city of Boston when he noticed a man on a bench, his face hidden, body huddled up, in an attitude of pain or withdrawal. The wall behind him is striated by the shadows of foliage, natural paintbrush strokes on a concrete wall. A solitary image that echoes his more recent work, “Rue de Crimée”, also presented in the exhibition. The four photographs, devoid of voyeurism and pessimism, show homeless people, living in the street next to Patrick Faigenbaum’s home.  The cities, inhabited and visited, portrayed like people, are another major component of Patrick Faigenbaum’s corpus. During a trip to Prague, in the early 1990s (he had discovered the city in 1984), his eyes shifted: from portraits to city, from urban fabric to inhabitants, no longer seeing a distinction between the two subjects. He was invited to Bremen (Germany) from 1996 to 1998, where he experimented, for the first time, with color photography. The region of Calcutta (India), which he visited several times after being awarded the Henri-Cartier Bresson prize in 2013, is the setting for a decisive series of photographs, in which we recognize all the motifs that are important to him. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 Rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 18/1/5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com