pierre, feuille, ciseaux at PRIMO PIANO

Artists: Nel Aerts, Kasper Bosmans, Richard Sides

Exhibition title: pierre, feuille, ciseaux

Curated by: Stéphanie Cottin

Venue: PRIMO PIANO, Paris, France

Date: January 20 – March 19, 2016

Photography: Romain Darnaud, images copyright and courtesy of the artists and PRIMO PIANO, Paris

Once upon a time, not so long ago, in the Flamish harbour of Antwerpen, a nice hairdresser made this special request to the artist, he was treating for free. « Could you paint me something special, not a traditional painted sign with scissors and a comb, but a nice painting for my salon, so that customers have something to talk about…

Before being an ancestral game played in each schoolyard all over the world, in football stadiums, by Phoebe, Ross, Joe, Chandler, Monica and Rachel in the TV series « Friends ». Before being a game of hazard, a game between two persons, or between a person and a robot, « stone, paper, scissors” is an association of words, an association of images! We could continue indefinitely to make unpredictable word or images matches and begin to build a story, following ones imagination: stone, paper, scissors but why not swan, plane, bottle or disco ball, tree, belfry… Image after image, based on these storiesʼ embrios, our imagination takes the byways drawn in the boundless geography of narration, by opposition to the very controlled geography of Information.

Because reality is exhausted, runs out in front of all the authoritarian and frontal images; we are more and more questioning ourselves about their efficiency. We try to drift away from their aesthetic, to dissect them, to decontextualize them and associate them more freely, to make them talk differently, more deeply about our world.

Nel Aerts, Kasper Bosmans and Richard Sides are hunting for images, that they cut, associate and stick together. Each of them, in different ways, fictionalize reality; they are story-tellers of stories that remain to be invented!

Once upon a time there was a « night owl » dressed and hair-dressed like a Marie- Antoinette of the dancefloors, hanging around in all the openings and all the very hype places, never sure not to miss something and totally focused on the way people look at her… This could be the story of « Kwasterige Nachten » the big portrait of Nel Aerts, or not…

Nel Aerts hangs on the wall of her portraitsʼ gallery, imaginary and falsely naïve figures who, as ” The Characters” of Jean de la Bruyère, talk about their time, their customs. The diversity of the reality – fashion’s diktat, overconsumption, injured nature – fits with the diversity of the forms she uses. Her figures are made with different elements sticked together – natural elements (trees, stones…), objects (lamps, bottles…) – and almost each time represented with a cloudy sky in the back; like ancient and classical portraits. But here the clouds pile up! Her portraits talk more about melancholia and sadness than about highness and success! Willingly childish they talk about the theater of reality and the tragicomical roles it requires to play.

Once upon a time, far away from here, on the island of Cipango, a terrible wave, the biggest never seen, totally destroyed a nuclear plant that was built by the seashore…

Kasper Bosmans grasps the news, not in a frontal way; he doesnʼt treat the burning topics that blind us, but focuses on prominent and lasting facts. If he talks about Fukushima, itʼs by binding links with stories from other times and places. He develops a kind of « warburgish » iconography, by associating forms and symbols with no respect for their chronology, nore geography; forms, out of their original context, become universal, intemporal. His small paintings on wood have something of Warburg’s « Atlas Mnémosyne », are enigmatic rebuses, where we can, by stepping into the present timeʼs tracks, find traces of the past. Even if history repeats itself, in front of this precious miniatures drawn with silver, that are not totally finished if you darelly look at them, one could, who has not the key of the enigma, freely build on these contemporary illustrated legends.

Once upon a time there was an internaut, fond of all types of chocolate, who surfed a lot on the internet, filmed everything, was very aware of the actuality, and whose room was filled with images and pop iconsʼ posters, filled with hyper liked images…

Richard Sidesʼ installations, uses walls as blank paper. He contaminates space, as images and objects would virally contaminate our lifes. He spreads along electric wires press abstracts and largely seen, sometime trivial artifacts, that will lead us toward somebodyʼs tracks… a recommandable somebody?…who knows ? We know for sure that he is a voyeur. Out of their merchant or editorial context, the truth carried out by these images becomes uncertain and frail. The purpose of these objects vanishes to open the space for an invasive viral sampling, as a sad poem.

He doesnʼt claim any cause, he shows a certain insight for these bits and bobs, made of motos, infos, things, and a clear appetite for these scums of our society.  It is roughly the press review of a generation, that Richard Sides stages, which he leaves for our free interpretation.