Artist: Angélique Heidler
Exhibition title: Metallic K.O.
Curated by: Haydée Marin & Camille Besson
Venue: Café des Glaces, Tonnerre, France
Date: March 30 – June 15, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Café des Glaces
Angélique Heidler (*1992) lives and works in Ivry-sur-Seine. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2015. Her intuitive painting practice is structured in conjunction with collage, sewing and various printing of images that echo the paradoxical dualities embedded in consumerism’s representations. She uses aesthetic references from the endless flux of media and marketing, most of the time to evoke the nuanced construction of identity and individuals. Her work has been showed in France and internationally in galleries and institutions (selection) : Gossips, Nir Altman, Munich, 2024; Zero Moment of Truth, Weiss Falk, Zürich, 2024; Target Group Show, Braunsfelder, Cologne, 2023; May My Fiction Rule, Tilling, Montréal, 2022; Love Letters .CHF, Stadtgalerie, Bern, 2021; Piselli, Bad Water, Knoxville, 2021; Haus Wien, Ginny on Frederick, Vienna, 2021; Your Friends and Neighbors, Hight Art, Paris, 2020; Softview/Privatissime, Neuer Essener Kunstverein, Essen, 2020; Stay Safe, Shivers Only, Chantemanche, 2020; This Tragedy, Fonda, Leipzig, 2020; Heidler Mailaender, Galerie Derouillon, Paris, 2019; On ne sait plus quoi penser du serpent qui a peur, Galerie l’Inlassable, Paris, 2019; The Unlimited Dream Company, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, 2017; The Dark Ages, Supplement Gallery, London, 2017. She has been in residency at Résidence de Lindre-Basse, CAC Synagogue de Delme, (FR, 2023) Stadtgalerie Bern, (CH, 2021), Villa Lena (IT, 2016). She was shortlisted for the 5th edition of the Révélations Emerige prize (2017, FR).
-Pauline Roches
Angélique Heidler specifically conceived Metallic K.O. for Café des Glaces’ first floor in Tonnerre. She is presenting new paintings, alongside a corresponding installation. The wooden floor creaks and footsteps resonate eerily as you enter the former ballroom. Bright, magnetic colours highlight the seductive elements that make up the works. The gold and silver paint recall the glitz and glam of social events, while echoing against the sheets of metal that underline the materiality of the canvas. Angélique Heidler paints with everything, from the objects she collects – the desirable leftovers of the ultra-liberal era – to the burn marks on the canvas, which is left almost immaculate. Printed fabrics, rusty nails turned outwards, casino chips, stickers, pink razors, metal plates, shurikens, shattered mirrors, photos found at flea markets and heat-transferred images are as much part of her pictorial matter as the flat patches of metallic colour and the rapid strokes of red and green. Yet the palette used here is restricted. The canvases seem to have been made with a kind of sprezzatura[1] .
[1] Sprezzatura is an Italian word that appears for the first time in Le Livre du Courtisan by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528. For Castiglione, it meant “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”. Sprezzatura refers to a form of studied nonchalance, an art of doing things with apparent ease.
