Straddle The Line Between Form And Function at Galerie Jérôme Pauchant

Artists: Hadrien Gerenton, Micah Hesse, Rachel Koolen, Irina Lotarevich, Julien Meert, Loup Sarion

Exhibition title: Straddle The Line Between Form And Function

Venue: Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris, France

Date: June 17 – July 25, 2015

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris

To straddle the line between form and function, and not to follow the modernist corollary, which implies that form follows function. As a result of a functionalist ideology stating that the beauty of a produced object comes from its ability to adapt to its function, this concept remains enchanted by the notion of Beauty and imprisoned in rapture for the noble things present in this world.

The artists taking part in this group exhibition blur the boundaries between form and function, they act with transformations: not as “metamorphosing banality” but as the objects’ decline to banality, their power to mobilize and generate worlds. The object is thus reduced to what it is as it is, up to the lowest point near reality: this damaged life that we want to hide under a veil of decency. Here the return of a flat ontology is at stake, where sacred and secular, real and virtual, backstage and onstage would be indifferently embraced without hierarchy or value, though not exhausting its capacity to fascinate.

By investing common places of our practical lives, such as car parks that we tend to ignore until we use them, the artists redefine our attachment to material things in the “hypermateriality” they have, where “matter is always already a form, where form is always already an information, and where immateriality appears for what it is: an invention that can trick minds”1. In this high, daily or ordinary life, only designers seem to care enough to organize their intricate apparatus, revealing this world. However it is from this both technical and economical infrastructure that political and legal forms develop, that our cognitive representations expand, that our affects and inner relationships take root, our relationships with others, with the world. And because this apparatus goes through us, builds us, connects us one another, it should be lived today as an aesthetic experience allowing a new critical range.

So are the half-mast banners created by Loup Sarion. Flourishing a kind of collective dream which rises them to symbol, the banners represent the contradiction between being the vector of a consumerist moral and its programmed baseness. The DeWALT tool cases of Irina Lotarevich, filled with stagnant water mixed with beauty products or Listerine mouthwash rally the evocative and ornamental strength of trademarks omnipresent on our city walls. The house furniture of Hadrien Gérenton is distorted to unusual uses redefining their purpose: the function then follows the form; while Rachel Koolen places artworks pending resurrection. For all, this is not about working against and because of a material basis which would regulate our behaviors, but with it and thanks to it. The artists present here pure logistics from these diverted looks, what makes things what we envisage them to be, acquiring their “essence” by the singular use of what we can make with it.

– Marion Zilio