2014 April : EXIT

OLIVIER CASTEL – FOUNTAIN

Posted on 2014-04-14

In 2010, aged eighty, the French actor Jeanne Moreau performed a public reading of the screenplay for Le Moine (The Monk), written by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière in 1970. Moreau was cast in the role of Mathilde, a wicked and seductive woman who disguises herself as a monk and causes a succession of terrible events, but the film was never realised.

For his exhibition at Ibid, Castel has made a re-recording of Moreau’s reading performed by a German woman, who happens to be a singer, and who speaks very little French. Like the majority of visitors to the exhibition, the narrator doesn’t understand the content of the French text. She performs the words as a melody. The meaning is removed and the language becomes abstract. In French, the words for voice (voix) and path (voie) are homophonous, suggesting the potential of the voice to create its own path.

Castel uses the voice to animate the room, like a musical box. The darkened room mimics the succession of spaces in which the story takes place – a monk’s cell, cellar, bedroom, confessional box, cave, carriage, dungeon, prison cell and balcony. The transformation of the room by Mathilde’s voice mirrors the transformation she operates on the main character, the monk, as he turns from piety to sexual desire, murder and ultimately Satanism.

The unrealised film is staged without images; comprising the voice, the room and a red spot of light from a moving head light, programmed to draw continuously on the gallery floor for the time taken to read the screenplay aloud. The light is reminiscent of a candle or a flame dancing in a fire. It recalls the Gothic, echoing the origins of the screenplay – a late 18th Century novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis – but also the proto-cinematic, as an elementary form of moving image.

A series of drawings on the walls break from the main focus of the exhibition and permit the visitor to explore the space on their own terms. The drawings are made of powdered cement, a material that is transformed as part of a process and used here in an unfinished state. The drawings are photographed in black and white and printed on acetate. Like the light, the drawings present a partial representation and one that is temporal, existing only long enough for the photograph to be taken.

Exhibition runs through to May 3rd, 2014

Ibid.
37 Albemarle Street
London
W1S 4JF

ibidprojects.com

MARIA RUBINKE – IT’S BETTER TO BURN OUT THAN TO FADE AWAY

Posted on 2014-04-14

The pure white porcelain surface attracts the gaze of the viewer, but at the same time distorts our presuppositions when the small porcelain girls are slowly broken down and subjected to contrast-filled madness. They sink down and seem to drown in the thick mud of the bog and are fatally bitten by a snake. Like the Surrealists, Maria Rubinke thematizes the complexity of the human psyche and works in a formal idiom all her own.

The exhibition has been created throughout the artist’s 27th year – a year that has offered emotional ups and downs. With inspiration from ‘Club 27’, the group of legendary artists who lost their lives at the age of 27, combined with her own experience, Maria Rubinke subjects her innocent little china girl to a process of decomposition until she has quite vanished and only the delicate little shoes remain, slowly consumed by an army of ants.

Maria Rubinke works in an extremely structured way, but for this exhibition has for the first time let go from the beginning of the creative process and let the works slowly create themselves as she worked through her own personal crisis. This is why there are also traces of a kind of panic throughout the exhibition, which reflects the emotional plunge the artist has undergone – Rubinke has let go, let the dark, gloomy thoughts find expression in the porcelain, ending with a rebirth. This is manifested in the sculpture I died a hundred times, which shows the porcelain girl standing on a heap of black skulls, carrying a small infant whose umbilical cord has not yet been cut. The title of the sculpture is a quotation from the singer Amy Winehouse – a ‘member’ of Club 27.

Exhibition runs through to May 17th, 2014

Martin Asbæk Gallery
Bredgade 23
DK-1260 Copenhagen
Denmark

www.martinasbaek.com

CHALKIE DAVIES – GOES CLICK

Posted on 2014-04-14

The exhibition celebrates the Welsh-born, US-based portrait photographer Chalkie Davies. Chalkie Davies’s music photographs from the 1970s and 80s and is a prequel to a major museum show of his work at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff in 2015.

Chalkie’s images will need no introduction to readers of the British music press in the seventies and eighties. Until now, however, he has remained under the radar of photography collectors, because he has only recently started the painstaking process of reviewing his archives, and making signed limited editions for the collectors market.

Opposite – Ian Dury, Dentist

Exhibition runs through to April 26th, 2014

Snap Galleries
12 Piccadilly Arcade
London
SW1Y 6NH

www.snapgalleries.com

IRVING PENN – CIGARETTES

Posted on 2014-04-14

This exhibition will feature approximately 16 images from the Cigarettes series, which he made during a fertile period that also produced his most spectacular still life photographs. The series was also the first that Penn presented as platinum palladium prints.

“In 1972, he produced a series of photographs of cigarette butts… [which] had been smoked down to the end then discarded. He placed one, two or three of these on a white background and photographed them using a large-format camera. The prints were made in the platinum-palladium process that provides a rich tonal range, showing clearly the dirt, wrinkles, mud and dust that disfigured them. The elegance of these pictures is similar to that which we find in his pictures for Chanel’s cologne for men, for Clinique’s lipstick or in brightly colored still lifes of flowers. Whether the subject be cigarette butts or high fashion, they find equivalence through the elegance of Penn’s technique.”
– Michiko Kasahara, excerpted from an essay published in Irving Penn Photographs (Wildenstein Tokyo, 1997)

Opposite – “Cigarette No. 17” New York, 1972/1975

Exhibition runs through to April 19th, 2014

Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film
5-17-1 2F Roppongi Minato-ku
Tokyo #106-0032
Japan

www.takaishiigallery.com

CHRIS ENGMAN – INK ON PAPER

Posted on 2014-04-14

Ink on Paper represents a temporary shift in Engman’s artistic practice from photographic documentation of environmental installation phenomena – records of process and the passage of time – to a consideration of photographs themselves as an inherently false, mediated and distancing way to experience the world. By focusing not on outer constructions but on the photograph itself as a constructed challenge to perception, this new body of work continues Engman’s inquiry into the illusive and unknowable nature of reality.

In Ink on Paper, what a photograph preserves is limited: one view from one person, the third dimension of space, absent sounds, smells, and other contexts removed – all but perhaps 1/125th of a second gone. This may sound like an indictment but it isn’t; it is precisely these qualities of photography that are compelling to Engman – the paradox of seeming to have but not having.

“Skew” is a term used in digital image manipulation, however, the works titled Skew and Double Skew have not been skewed with a software program; they are unadulterated “pure” images. They are skewed in the way that ordinary things appear skewed all around us all the time, mostly unnoticed. In these works, the frames and the shape of the images have been skewed to simulate perspective and mirror the naturally occurring distortion of ordinary sight. The viewer is irreconcilably displaced: in Skew, what is seen frontally seems to be the view from the right; in Double Skew, from the left and below.

For Engman, these works depend upon a kind of logic that tries to add up to a sense of wholeness. They are visualized expressions of ways of ordering the world – internally consistent, but in the end they are, and feel, empty. It is the emptiness that Engman is attracted to. “Logic”, he says, “can be beautiful even when built upon nothing at all.” This is, perhaps, the central ethos of his project as an artist.

Exhibition runs through to May 10th, 2014

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2635 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA
90034

www.luisdejesus.com

RONE – APACHE EP

Posted on 2014-04-14

French Artist Erwan Castex AKA Rone follows up the reissue of his incredible 2012 LP Tohu Bohu with Apache EP on the Parisian imprint InFiné Music. With a heavy reliance on the synthesiser, ‘Bachi-Bouzouk’ begins with a delicate ambience before slowly developing into a hypnotic piece of progressive electronica drenched in tension that builds to a peak before giving way to searing synth patterns. On the other side we find ‘Origin’ which pushes a noisier, abstracted sound.