Le Bleu de la Nuit at CCA Andratx

Artists: Armando Andrade Tudela, Julien Bouillon, Sophie Bueno Boutellier, Emmanuelle Castellan, Lorraine Chateaux, Emmanuel Crivelli, Niels Trannois

Exhibition title: Le Bleu de la Nuit

Curated by: Niels Trannois

Venue: CCA Andratx, Majorca, Spain

Date: July 22 – August 29, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and CCA Andratx

Le Bleu de la Nuit is the French title of Joan Didion’s famous ”Blue Nights”, I read this book back in 2014 when I was at the CCA Andratx. During my Journey in Mallorca I had the chance to travel across the Island to get a feeling of what it is made of. The more I discovered it, the more I somehow draw its psychological map, the traumas it was built upon with, its schizophrenia between hard-core mass tourism resorts and breath-taking, overwhelming nature. Back in those days there was a lot of road cyclists, pretty much like professionals, in my personification of the Island I imagined them as blood riding through the veins. As I drawn into fictions thanks to this set, I imagined a character who could have been a collector in Majorca, he would have tasted its hysteria as much as he appreciated the retreat it could offer. As he became older he stayed in the background in his villa, away from violent social environments, trying to protect himself from memory loss.

Joan Didion’s book is also about disease, the progression of her daughter’s one. ”Le Bleu de la Nuit” is a book about pain and experiences which Didion renders through matter and atmosphere, those parameters leads her to the images of her life, of her environment she describes with no complacency in a dry way.

Healing through a set, an atmosphere was then the starting point of ”Le Bleu de la Nuit” as a show. It was conceived in the aim of being an intimate display which could be seen through matter and atmosphere, a portrait of K.J. my fictional character. The artworks I chose act in some kind of anchors, which define his personality, his portrait in a hollow.

So, surrounded and randomly,
Pale paintings as pale carnage, cut out mariposa to heavy to fly.
Obsolete devices from parallels cords, speaking a sub silent language together
Brancusi smashed post modernist objects, drawing on sculptures, dream on
One minute drawing swing in never ending refined hand made tapestry
Raw denim pockets as patterns, blurry brushes and drawing made of smooth pencils
Glyphs on squids, painted fans, water cooler tags from one rush to extended times
A journal about attractive presages, structured vision and radical phantasms

and the wall as a fence, as a back rest, as a plinth, as a center point, or the main (or last) furniture in K.J.’s complex mind. The cross between his past and his futur, something like projection which as already happen, a present.

Back in 2014 I wrote those lines about K.J., ”Le Bleu de la Nuit” is also a projection of those lines.

”… Since then his memory slowly collapsed, if souvenirs were dots, he now just can’t join them anymore, something broke in his left cortex as the disease evolves.

Hell zeimer he used to say, this ability of not taking things for granted,
Europe, You rape
You rock,
U rope You rape your rope”

–Niels Trannois, 2016