Artists: Dorian Gaudin, Hadrien Gerenton, Matthieu Haberard, Brendan Anton Jaks, Robert Janitz, Justin Meekel
Exhibition title: Rebranding Floes
Venue: Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris, France
Date: June 4 – July 23, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Jérôme Pauchant
In a distant future, where time has become circular, a machine produces artifacts. The scientists who created this machine, imagined a mechanism that could regenerate the oceans. But the experiment failed.
Unable to reproduce the sea, the new instrument simply imitates its movement, producing autonomous forms: echoes of elements of a day to day that has vanished. Most of these forms communicate only through bubbles. Looking into each bubble, you can recognize a familiar environment: at its center, the model of a different machine producing artifacts. These are the forms the world could have taken if it had not become what we see it.
Jérôme Pauchant gallery presents Rebranding Floes, a group exhibition that brings together the works, most of them created for the show, of six artists from different backgrounds.
Relying in particular on the power of storytelling and science fiction, this exhibition proposes a shift in viewpoint, a change of perspective on the possible transformations of a world in danger. The works dialogue in the gallery space as though they have ‘already lived’, thus functioning as reflections of objects of our daily life. Their ephemeral nature is confronted with that of our environment. The gallery thus offers us a new landscape where the boundaries between interior and exterior, luxury and necessity, the past and the laws of evolution, are upset.
Central to the exhibition, Aging Beauty by Dorian Gaudin plunges us into a suspended temporality. The artist is interested in how visual experience can extend to machines to create new forms ‘in quest to function’. Between set design and romantic ruin, this mechanism makes perceptible the noise of time passing, and questions our relationship to contemplation. In contrast, the Phylacteries by Justin Meekel crystallize an instant transforming it into an object. Resulting from Meekel’s research around language abstractions, these ‘bubble-works’ make tangible the precise moment in which form and meaning merge. The gallery space thus becomes a place for the research of new syntaxes and unknown languages. Wagering how the possibilities of a future existence will be subjected to alternative modes of expression and representation.
Drawings replace words in the titles of Mathieu Haberard’s assemblages. His sculptures give us a glimpse of a cluster of objects and references, each of which can be appropriated to make its own narrative. Paintings by Robert Janitz become the meeting point between gesture, trail and autobiographical references: memory membranes where the negation of the picture becomes a source of the creation of a new language to decode. We find the idea of erasure and propagation in the work of Brendan Anton Jaks, who imagines pieces at the boundary between industrial fossils and scale models of a future dystopia.
His work resonates with the sculptures of Hadrien Gérenton, which are in turn nourished by metaphysical questions tinged with humor. The artist imagines a Totem on a human scale that reminds humans of their dimension and tame plants that appear ready to move in space in search of oxygen.
Playing on the complexity and the relations between presentation and representation, failure and functionality, copy and original, these artists question the way we inhabit our environment, to ‘rebrand’ it.
– Martina Sabbadini
Dorian Gaudin, Aging Beauty, 2015
Bois, acier, moteur, peinture, mécanisme et composants éléctriques, 324 x 301 x 96,5 cm
Dorian Gaudin, Aging Beauty, 2015
Bois, acier, moteur, peinture, mécanisme et composants éléctriques, 324 x 301 x 96,5 cm
Dorian Gaudin, Aging Beauty, 2015
Bois, acier, moteur, peinture, mécanisme et composants éléctriques, 324 x 301 x 96,5 cm
Hadrien Gerenton, Succulent strategy (aloe), 2015
Gomme polyurethane, pigments, polyester, plomb, fibre de verre, 64 x 69,5 x 43 cm
Hadrien Gerenton, I have no longer I inspirations, only memories (Totem), 2016
Résine polyester, pigments, cendres, fibres de verre, 118 x 55,5 x 7 cm
Justin Meekel, Phylactère, 2016
Impression sur film polyester PET, verre feuilleté, 28 x 33 x 28,5 cm
Justin Meekel, Phylactère, 2016
Impression sur film polyester PET, verre feuilleté, 71,2 x 116 x 27 cm
Matthieu Haberard, 2016
Plâtre, métal, acrylique, 90 x 60 x 55 cm
Matthieu Haberard, Repos à notre Dame de Nazareth, 2016
Plâtre, métal, acrylique, epoxy, bois, 62,5 x 38 x 27,5 cm
Robert Janitz, Your browser does not support the audio element, 2016
Huile, cire et farine sur toile de lin, 63,5 x 50,5 cm