Morgan Fisher‌, Guillaume Leblon‌, Sol LeWitt‌, Florian Pumhösl‌, Evariste Richer‌, Armando Andrade Tudela‌, Raphaël Zarka

( )
Curated by Christophe Gallois
As part of the NEUTRE INTENSE exhibition cycle 27.11.08 – 17.01.09

Armando Andrade Tudela
Morgan Fisher
Guillaume Leblon
Sol LeWitt
Florian Pumhösl
Evariste Richer
Raphaël Zarka

( ) is part of the series of exhibitions entitled Neutre intense, which aims to explore the possibility of a paradox: the intensity of the neutral. This idea refers to a series of lectures, The Neutral, given by Roland Barthes in 1978. “For me, the neutral doesn’t refer to ‘impressions’ of grayness, of ‘neutrality,’ of indifference. The neutral – my neutral – can refer to intense, strong, unprecedented states”: the tension galvanized by Barthes in his lectures seems to echo a twofold dynamic, seen in the practice of many artists, between, on one hand, modes of formal and semantic reduction and, on the other, the complexity and plurality of meanings that this reduction entails. A direction developed in this exhibition echoes the way in which Barthes conceives of the neutral from the perspective of the heteroclite: “The best neutral,” he writes, “is not the null, it’s the plural.” The exhibition ( ) focuses on artistic practices that deploy a confrontation between a formal vocabulary derived from abstraction or minimalism and exterior elements taken from daily life, natural environment, art history or pop culture. It develops the idea of the circulation of forms through heterogeneous contexts.

In an interview with curator François Piron, Raphaël Zarka states, “What interests me is to see how certain, very particular forms are situated in different contexts. When I say context, this can mean a spatial as well as a temporal context.” Both his works Préfiguration de la collection des Rhombis (2008) and Seven Years Later (2008) are based on the emergence of a singular form – the rhombicuboctahedron – into various contexts, from Renaissance art to concrete constructions photographed on a waste land. They function as two elements taken from a wider collection of forms. Studiolo (2008) is a three-dimensional replica of Saint Jerome’s reading cabinet as it was painted by Antonello da Messina in 1474-1475. The cabinet, a space dedicated to the collection of books, study and reading illustrates the artist’s interest in a work method based on the subjective association of ideas and forms from diverse contexts.

Morgan Fisher’s Film Cans and Film Boxes (1968) is part of a series of spray paint drawings created in the late sixties, which depict combinations of different models of film canisters and boxes from an isometric perspective. At the beginning of his career, Morgan Fisher worked as an editor in Hollywood studios, and this work illustrates his interest for the elements that surround the film industry. He writes, “For me, the film cans and boxes were the perfect subject. I found them beautiful, and they were an extension of the tendency in my films at the time to deal with the subject of film by showing the equipment that you use to make it. A camera stands for the entire system of machines that make movies, and beyond that, the institution of which the machines are the technical base. A roll of film does the same thing.”

The artwork, conceived as a simple process unfolding in all its complexity, is a notion that spans Sol LeWitt’s practice. His book Cube (1990) assembles 511 black and white images of the same cube photographed from an identical point of view with different lighting each time. To preface this series of images, a photograph of the studio and a description of the process present LeWitt’s procedure: the photographs correspond to all possible combinations between nine lights placed around the cube. The ensemble unfolds as a variation, in the musical sense of the word, proliferating the play of subtleties, shadows and contrasts over the course of the pages.