Sous le silence (Beneath Silence) is a solo show devoted to the work of Jan Kopp (Ger, 1970). Filling all of the galleries at La Villa du Parc, Sous le silence features new works that reflect the different facets and creative processes of an art practice that is based on the poetry of the day-to-day, materials that can be found all around us, and spaces that are held in common. Cut plants, dried flowers, old broken-down discarded objects, and recyclable materials are arranged in assemblages that put them back in active circulation, fitted together in surprising combinations, and grafted onto one another with care.
The show is built on a perceptual and formal tension between La Villa’s two floors, an intentionally achieved balance between a dense organic space that is the outcome of a group effort dependent on a number of hands and points of view. This led to other spaces that are more solitary, synthetic, and restrained, the result of experimenting with these art materials in the studio. In works by the artist, seemingly disjointed elements are brought together, forming connections in a much larger whole unifying them while they ricochet from one room to the next.
Allowing lots of space for being and making together is the dynamic at work in Kopp’s art. At La Villa he is offering for the three weeks scheduled for mounting his exhibition an open and inclusive experience to various groups of the city’s inhabitants and the surrounding region, all ages welcome. The artist is carrying on – and reviving – a year of experimental workshops for both young and old, individuals and groups, on the veranda of La Villa du Parc and in the Michel Butor Garden in Lucinges. These instances of coming together to exchange and share with others in an art environment will give rise in the end to a large generative sculpture, fitting together recycled rod-shaped pieces put away and forgotten in closets and garages.
BIO
Jan Kopp (born in 1970 in Germany) likes to capture those tiny moments of our existence in which beings and objects escape, if only for an instant, their fate or function. It is in that imperceptible interval between two phenomena that the artist constructs his art. Kopp has done several residency programs in France and abroad, including at PS1/MoMA in New York. His work has been shown at the Georges Pompidou Center, Galerie des enfants (2015), the Centre d’art de la Criée in Rennes (2013), the Centre d’art Contemporain, Abbaye de Maubuisson (2011), the Kunstraum Dornbirn (2010, Austria), FRAC Alsace (2008),
and the Centre d’art de la Bastille in Grenoble (2008).
