Artist: Maxence Chevreau
Exhibition title: Zipping along
Venue: Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France
Date: June 8 – August 31, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain
The title could meane something like “to compress with complicity.” If some pieces do indeed proceed from compression, one must well ask oneself from what do they draw their example. As for
complicity, it surely resides in a generous invitation to flânerie.
This young artist proclaims an artistic practice based in narrative logic whose forms and scenography is inspired from writing. The exhibition is made up of three groups of works that function as so many archetypal characters from a commedia dell’arte of a new type. In this way, we find casts of natural objects which he has gathered during his wanderings. Totems with softly drawn forms whose human scale contradicts the small size of the found objects, and abstract canvases which recall the colored backgrounds of animated cartoons (the title by the way is taken from an episode of Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner from 1953). One also gladly notices the proposition of a history of abstraction that has been a bit hurried… or compressed in three stages: a direct transfer from an observed reality, an exaggeration – or even a dissolution – of form through line, and a confident abstraction in the field of color. And finally, having said that, a forsaken rope, brings a touch of sensuality to this otherwise well regulated ballet. Its chromatic composition resembles a genetic code that could very well be the DNA of the entire exhibition. Indeed, Zipping along offers to feel and experience the sequenced rhythms like onomatopias in that act in total complicity.
