Pianissimo
Guy Ben Ner, Wojciech Gilewicz, Alex Hubbard, Assan Smati

DISTORTION OF AN UNENDURABLE REALITY

Du 14 mars au 26 avril 2008
Vernissage 14 mars 2008, 19 h.

Galerie Bernard Ceysson
8, rue des Creuses
42000 Saint-Étienne

Né en Israel en 1969, Guy Ben-Ner vit et travaille entre New York et Berlin. En moins de dix ans, l'artiste s'est propulsé sur la scène internationale et ce, surtout depuis la présentation de Treehouse Kit au pavillon israélien de la Biennale de Venise en 2005 où il proposait une relecture désopilante du mythe de Robinson Crusoé et de notre société du prêt-à-emporter. En 2006, il n'avait pas moins de cinq expositions personnelles : Konrad Fisher Galerie, Düsseldorf ; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris ; Postmasters Gallery, New York ; CCP - Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy ; Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

" Art is the distortion of an unendurable reality... Art is correction, modification of a situation; art is communication, connection... Art is social, self-sufficient, and total.
Jean Tinguely.

It happens sometimes to step back and find ourselves attracted by the ruins of what we have destroyed, lost in that pensive stupor that so often follows action, waiting for a sign of new life. In their continuous chasing each other, destruction and creation have been at the foundation of the contemporary artistic discourse, becoming along the way one of its main obsessions. This state of continuous becoming has lead several artists to concentrate on the transitional nature of the creative processes, approaching the impermanent, the fragile and the relative. In an article dedicated to the work of Alex Hubbard, the critic Joshua Johnson noticed how this attitude, more than being the ultimate exercise on the “decline of modernism”, actually records as a humorous satire of that tired truism.

In the video “I’d give it to you if I could but I borrowed it”, Guy Ben-Ner and his two kids nonchalantly burglarize a contemporary art museum, scoring construction material for the in-site fabrication of a common bicycle. The bike will become instrumental to a very particular collective “trip”, with unexpected psychedelic overtones. The sterile silence of the museum halls seems now light-years away.

Wojciech Gilewicz exploits his painting skills in a concept-based performative practice that questions the agency of contemporary arts and their ability to relate to different contexts. Gilewicz invades the quiet of the urban and suburban environments he moves in with faithful reproductions of their degrade and banality that he finally super-imposes to the real thing. Apart from the context they ideally belong to, Gilewicz’s paintings present themselves as small and medium-large monochromes, grey-ish abstractions, fragments of an interrupted artistic discourse, revealed in all of their icy incommunicativity.

In Alex Hubbard’s videos the screen simultaneously becomes picture plane, unlikely pedestal and theater of an incoherent series of per formative acts. Chasing each other, the actions quote key gestures and movements in contemporary arts history, often co-opting the visual vocabulary of cinema and television. Creation and destruction follow each other continuously, leaving us to a sort of fascinated stupor, facing the exuberant visuality of this meaningless search for the “New”.

Assan Smati creates forms and structures in which the monumentality is expressed as mere potential. The sculptures are conceptualized and elaborated assuming the failure of the ideals and ideologies that they seem to represent. What’s left is the bulky ghost of a chronologically far-away past, still alive and present in the vibrant substance and hard-edged fabrication of the sculpture."

Thanks to Postmaster Gallery for Guy Ben Ner