Last day for visting Almine Rech’s seminal parody of the artscape

French gallerist Almine Rech’s private life has been circulating quite freely online especially after an extensive reportage about her published in 2013 by W Magazine. From her early passion for painting, the experience as an art dealer with her former husband Cyrille Putman, to her current marriage to Pablo Picasso’s most famous heir Bernard and the foundation she runs with him, Rech is probably most famous now for managing three major contemporary art galleries in Paris, Brussels and London. What we find remarkable in her recent program is a couple of exhibitions that, arranged and signed by external curators who tried to mix works by both her represented artists and loans from somewhere else, have managed to deliberately destroy references and contexts with their space-quantity of works exaggerated ratio. Curated by Nicolas Trembley, one opened in Brussels in June 2014 with the title of Platform and consisted of a 17 meter long podium on which more than 50 three-dimensional both art and design objects were displayed. The other, this time signed by Eric Troncy, is on display now in Paris and, perhaps because it deals with a medium – painting – often regarded as the ultimate artistic expression, has prompted heated debates.

 

The Shell (Landscapes, Portraits & Shapes) – this is the title of the exhibition – is arguably one of these events deemed to cause strong judgments not much among those who Alain Resnais has recently called ‘the art world stakeholders’ to indicate the typical parties bearing economical interest in the art industry, but more within those whose political or aesthetic passion for art comes before its profitable quality. In other words, a gallery space filled with works by some of the most commercially successful painters of the last decades, crammed together with a gap of only a few centimetres from one another as they were street advertising posters or thumbnails of an Internet image gallery, creating sometimes bizarre aesthetic or thematic associations, seems to have been hitting much less on collectors’ sensibility than it has on that of artists and art critics.

 

To both these two latter enraged groups, we would like to respond trying to explain why The Shell is potentially a very interesting show.

The main critique we’ve heard coming from artists about the show is how a single painter’s individuality gets irremediably compromised when their work is physically associated with another one so closely to appear within a single viewer’s glance. In this case, the counter question is how artists making objects that eventually are left (or sold) to the public can expect them to be always under a certain artistic control. To painters regarding their works as unalienable part of their individuality, we cannot but say that the responsibility that comes from giving them away should be taken with respect for the recipient or the so-called Other. After all, trying to fix one own’s individuality in a material (this being paint on canvas, marble, video, etc) is already a process of losing control on it. Besides, as the press release of the exhibition claims probably echoing the curator’s voice, in a age where online platforms destroy any type of information hierarchy and the original significance of images very often blurs after uncontrolled circulation or because of missing references, we hardly see paintings as having necessarily to be displayed in a different manner simply because of their physicality, especially when painters themselves like or push for their works to be present in the digital blob.

 

Having tried to dismiss the critique on the general attitude of the curatorial idea, we could therefore look in particular and focus on the specific associations of The Shell instead of any association in any exhibition, to see if we liked how the curator, as an artist, has done his job well in terms of selection and composition. In this case, the first task would be to understand how much freedom he was really given while drawing his selection of artists. However impossible to know for sure and despite clues that some works were borrowed especially for the occasion, we believe he had surely to comply with marketability of the works and so possibly make some compromises to an original shape the show might have had in his mind.

 

But regardless of a curator’s constrains and freedoms in the selection of the artists for a show, a topic which is no the one of this text, we don’t want to delve into a single painting/practice of the exhibition even when many words could be spent, especially for those we found particularly interesting such as David Hockney’s iPad paintings with their strange look in between gestures and pixels, the pastoral geometry of Alex Katz’s Three Cows, the crossover between painting and prints of Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, the apparent boring-yet-quirky countryside of Karen Klimnik. Besides, being able to shift the focus from single paintings to the totality of the exhibition is precisely one of the quality of The Shell.

 

Our interest here is rather to see how some combinations manage to break categories such as those we find in the exhibition title (landscape, portrait and shapes) and create subjective narrations by a viewer that immersed in such overwhelming spectacle cannot help but emancipate themselves and create their own truth about what they see instead of looking for a certain significance of a single body of work. For instance, it is clear that juxtaposing Betty Tompkins’ sex scenes with the floating colours of Jean-Baptiste Bernadet’s abstractions or the glance of the Last Looks by Brian Calvin squeezed between the shapes by Erik Lindman and Bertrand Lavier cannot but leave room for inventive story-making. Or similarly but more on the technical side, the long and evident brushstrokes of Alain Sechas next to the clusters of paint in Tursic & Mille’s landscape seem to create a performance of the possible artistic uses of paint beyond any historical accurateness. Ironically, the only isolated work in the show is the statue of a caveman by Katarina Fristch wandering in the middle of the space looking determined with his simple mind in the middle of a show so overwhelming that only his subjectivity and inventiveness could guide him in a sort of quest for meaning.

 

However, the caveman could be also regarded as the symbol of over simplicity, a sort of frivolity that is exactly what bothers the disappointed critics we mention at the beginning of this article. Especially in the words of Sabrina Tarasoff who published a highly polemic review on Art Agenda, The Shell represents the sort of nihilism art should avoid for the sake of political radicalism or any other clear significance in a precise geographical and historical context. For her, what Eric Troncy’s show manages to do is simply representing the sheer accumulation of valuable objects while failing the task of prompting meaningful narrations with its extreme juxtapositions and entertaining quality.

 

The first critique could be more acceptable if it wasn’t that such display of valuable objects in a relatively small space is so exaggerated that could eventually come across as a parody of the entire art system. Whether or not in the curator’s intentions, while visiting The Shell we found it so over commercial and so closed to a kitschy contemporary Internet salon that we stopped taking it seriously on a political level and regarded the whole project as a sort of satire.

 

As to creating meanings in such painting chaos, Tarasoff sees it as an impossible task since any of the ‘real’ references, styles, and topics that these paintings should the bearer of break in the name of a sheer entertainment. For us, it is again the exaggerated way in which the show is designed that helps surpassing the idea of having any reference, style and topic at all except for those the viewer can come up with. Perhaps suffering from the self referentiality often typical of the art world, those meaningless connections Tarasoff is referring to are those that don’t mean anything only to art world specialists. Without undermining the role of expertise in the field of contemporary art, its critique should perhaps take the opportunity of shows like The Shell to open up and absorb suggestions and meanings made by potential ‘outsider spectators’, a move that, if nothing more, would at least push what seems an enclosed elite of intellectuals and wealthy people to temporarily break and see what art can do for the other.

July 18, 2015