Taken from the title of my short story written in 2011, Le Soir du Poulpe is also a short film project in progress. In this exhibition, you will be able to see the storyboard boards, before entering one of the rooms of the decor: a Parisian maid’s room where the protagonist writes the short story Le Soir du Poulpe.
In The Projective Drawing, curator Brett Littman applies Evans’ theory, which takes a skeptical look at drawing as a means of understanding the foundations of architecture, to challenge our understanding of how drawing technique works in contemporary culture by highlighting artists whose drawings require visitors to activate a complex matrix of non-traditional ideas in their interpretation of works. Presented.
The exhibition Élisée, a biography, aims to reconstruct a concentrate of landscape, reconciling the absolute and the fragment. The floor, the walls, the ceiling are invested. The visitor is surrounded everywhere by flowers, the sky, mountains, streams, trees. They are drawn, painted, screen printed, printed. Ceramic seats, as well as cork and felt from a collaboration with designer Romain Guillet, punctuate the course as many spaces and potential rest times. The visitor is invited to stop, observe the landscape that presents itself to him, but also to read or dream about anything else.
Taking this quote from the British artist Avis Newman as a starting point, the exhibition by Nikolaus Gansterer, an Austrian artist, highlights a broad conception of drawing that apprehends it as a process, that realizes and recognizes the both established and supposed potentials of this art form, as well as those that can still be revealed through experimentation and curiosity, and who imagines various forms by which the drawing can be made manifest, materialize and take shape.
At first glance, there is nothing. At least so little that the eye is immediately summoned to scrutinize the sheet of paper on which he thinks he sees only fine dust or grease stains. On closer inspection, he quickly takes the measure of a form of trompe-l’oeil, to finally dig even further and discover how the artist competes with reality with the help of simple black and colored pencils. Thwarts all perception of it and turns it over to the order of a pretense.
There are works that jump out at you, that almost assault the viewer, when the colours burst out like grenades, and then there are those that are more discreet, that make less noise and into which one penetrates, discovering little by little a troubled and unknown world, at the risk of losing oneself in it, or at least of coming out of it with more worries than certainties. Christian Lhopital’s drawings belong to the latter group.
Extenuating Circumstances is an evocative title in a world where urban art is torn between the judicial convictions of some and the institutional recognition of others. Lek & Sowat are self-taught artists from the illegal practice of graffiti, but recognized and exhibited by official cultural institutions, and in particular by the Villa Medici, which welcomed them as boarders under the title of “urban artists” (new name) in 2016.
With this film, Cristobal Diaz reflects on the writing of a history of contemporary art and his plastic research. He chooses to start from an exhibition to end up with a film that offers several possible levels of reading, through an aesthetic thought and mastered as part of an in situ realization.
On a proposal from Christine Phal, founder of the Drawing Lab and DRAWING NOW Art Fair, the members of the artistic committee invited emerging artists from the young European scene to present drawing and animation videos.
This program of videos reveals the diversity and richness of contemporary drawing that never ceases to surprise. The drawing takes possession of the place by animating itself in different forms.
For her exhibition at the Drawing Lab, Gaëlle Chotard has created an in situ installation: the framework, begun in the studio, has been finalised in the space in order to experiment with the spontaneity offered by drawing and the understanding of space. The artist presents the drawing in volume and tension but this time placed in darkness, like a shadow theater as well as an unpublished selection of drawings and washes made between 2014 and 2018.
Free is an art installation designed by artist Valentin van der Meulen. This installation invites visitors to discover contemporary drawings inspired by photos of individuals as if taken on the spot, questioning the codes of the current image.
It encourages visitors to question the importance and influence of images in today’s society, whose daily lives are constantly invaded by the media and social networks.