Haluk Akakçe, Wilfrid Almendra, Marc Bijl, Marco Boggio Sella, Piero Golia, James Hopkins, Jan Klimes
04/05/2007 > 07/07/2007
Opening on 03/05/2007, from 7 pm to 9 pm
The exhibition Space Oddity presents eight works which share a singular relationship to the space they occupy. The title is drawn from David Bowie's famous single of 1969 - itself recalling the film 2001: Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1968 -, which recounts the adventures of Major Tom, a fictional astronaut lost in space. The exhibition assembles works with volume, both sculptures strictly speaking and wall works, that impose their strangeness in space - in this case, the gallery's space. Representative of a certain tendency in sculpture today, they flirt with representation or seemingly engage in it, only to further blur its meaning. Often made with heterogeneous materials collected from everyday life and then customized, they reference multiple registers, playfully mingling pop culture with erudition, suburbia with minimalism, passing from rock'n'roll to science fiction.
They exhibition opens with Four Foot Red Cube Inserted in the Middle of a Garden Bench, which, true to its title, presents a cube embedded in a garden bench. PIERO GOLIA (born in 1974 in Naples, lives and works in Los Angeles), by an intervention radical in scale but minimalist in form, deprives an object of its initial function while endowing it with a new aesthetic interest.
Appropriating the title of a single from the American group Eels, Novocaine for the Soul is a wall sculpture by HALUK AKAKÇE (born in 1970 in Ankara, lives and works in London), which succeeds in recreating, as in the animations for which he is best known, the depth of field for a mental space.
A block of aluminium as slender as the bow of a submarine, topped by a wrought iron crest and studded with ceramic spheres, surfing on a wooden base, Goodbye Sunny Dream by WILFRID ALMENDRA (born in 1972 in Cholet, lives and works in Cholet and Paris) is a kind of customized rock'n'roll Viking vessel imposing its mysterious presence on the space.
Echoing the spikes covering this last work, Justicia by MARCO BOGGIO SELLA (born in 1972 in Turin, lives and works in New York) is a wall panel bristling with threatening spines, covered with metallic green car paint and presented as an allegorical evocation of justice.
The work In My Dream There Were Three Different Doors by JAMES HOPKINS (born in 1976 in Stockport, England; lives and works in London) is a large interlocking structure made of three found doors, based on an ancient Japanese puzzle dating from the 10th century. The artist divests the doors of their function by transforming them into an obstacle that appears like a nightmarish labyrinth of closed entries.
With Tandem, Jan KLIMEŠ (born in 1980 in Brno, Czech Republic; lives and works in Brno) proposes an idiosyncratic and ironic version of a bicycle for two, literally composed of the absurd graft of two bicycles.
In the logic of his sculptural deconstructions of points of view, Main courante by Sébastien Vonier (born in 1975 in Ploemeur, France; lives and works in Rennes) suggests the outlines of a phantom staircase, proposing a new conception of space in which absence, disappearance and the invisible play an essential role. Amplified by the space which surrounds it, the familiar shape of this sculpture becomes a structure to house myriad potential scenarios.
Finally, in a second room, MARC BIJL pursues his iconoclast interrogations of symbols and codes of power, whether political, religious or economic, with Symbolic 4 (Bluetooth), three huge charred Bluetooth symbols and a video showing them aflame, evoking the Ku Kluk Klan's sinister cross burnings.