June 19 – July 31, 2018
By Louis Cane – Gedi Sibony
Curated by Marie Maertens
Emmanuel Barbault Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in The Surface of the East Coast, a group exhibition pairing American and French artists taking place across five New York Galleries. Curated by Marie Maertens, the concept of the exhibition was born from dialogue between the French Supports/Surfaces movement of the 1960’s and a new generation of New York Based artists.
Emmanuel Barbault Gallery presents Visible Reality pairing Louis Cane with Gedi Sibony. Bringing together two cultures and two generations of sculpture and paintings, a conversation emerges which echoes and feeds off each other, opening new formal issues and concepts of thought.
The Surface of the East Coast was first held in the summer of 2017 in Nice, France, the birthplace of the Supports/Surfaces movement where Maertens presented twenty-four artists at Le109. Now a year later, the discussion continues in New York at the following galleries: Emmanuel Barbault Gallery, TURN Gallery, Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, Josée Bienvenu Gallery and OSMOS.
Courtesy of Greene Naftali.
Courtesy of Greene Naftali.
Courtesy of Cesson & Bénétière.
Courtesy of Cesson & Bénétière.
Photographies: © Math Monahan
Visible Reality by Marie Maertens
The idea of The Surface of the East Coast started in New York after observing the works of American artists who echoed the formal questions of Supports/Surfaces: return to the constituent elements of a painting, questioning on representation and illusionism. I wondered if they knew this movement. Was there a link between these two generations of artists living in a historically, culturally and politically different context? After Le 109, center of contemporary art in Nice, which brought together 24 plastic artists last summer, the exhibition The Surface of the East Coast is spread in a more intimate format in five galleries in Manhattan and for a performance in Bushwick, at The Chimney.
Visible Reality offers an unprecedented dialogue between artists Louis Cane and Gedi Sibony.
For almost two decades, Gedi Sibony has been working with found objects and what may seem at first “poor quality objects”, selected carefully in the street and then tested in his studio before being incorporated into the corpus of his work. Some pieces remain unaltered, or recombined, viewed in reverse or turned around, reinvesting the topic of the frame, thereby activating the viewer’s own projection into the work. Sibony is positioned in a sort of performance of the” inframince”, which can also make the connection with his admiration for Henri Matisse, especially when the latter used little pure color on a raw canvas, in a conciseness that was obtained by a clear and precise gesture. As was the case of Louis Cane from his first works dating from 1966 and presented in this exhibition. Born in 1943, Cane recalls that the artistic environment is at the time that of American minimalism, conceptual art and kinetics. On the contrary, he wants to reaffirm the importance of the material, the singularity of the subject, or what must be considered as a non-subject, such as his Croix (Crosse), but also color. The latter becomes constitutive of the work and is no longer illustrative. Here again, it is in the pictorial culture and the quotation of Henri Matisse, notably of his cut papers, that the artist can refer.
For Gedi Sibony, when the color is already affixed, like those already painted on sides of trucks or trailers, a reflection on the act of doing and remaking follows. Is not art a question of addition and subtraction? Each in their own way, these two visual artists pursue a debate about representation, namely why to realize what has already been conceived or to be lulled by illusionism and narration? Even if each spectator always projects their own story, they can then imagine it more freely. Let us note that Louis Cane rebelled very early against figurative painting, but also against the post-war abstraction which, according to him, referred to a signifier. Reality exists, and procures to those who know how to look at it, material and inextinguishable content. In the core of their work, Louis Cane and Gedi Sibony are in a sort of constant back and forth, between distance and rapprochement. In a game of decomposition and recomposition, which could go back to the sources of Russian constructivism, they wonder about how adding allows to abstract and to make cuts in languages that are otherwise too imposing, so that something else can be born.
Marie Maertens is a curator, journalist, and art critic. Her credits as curator include: “The Surface of the East Coast” (2017) at Le 109, France, “The fourth sex”(« Le Quatrième sexe », January-February 2016), at the Cœur-Paris, “Desdemone, between desire and despair” (“Desdémone, entre désir et désespoir”, 2015) at the Institut du Monde Arabe, « Spirit Your Mind » (2015) at Free Spirits, Miami, “The B-side of performance” (« La Face B de la Performance », 2015) at MAC/VAL, “WANI” (2011) at the Ricard Foundation. Maertens is the author of Collect Video and Digital Art (Collectionner l’art video et digital, Presses du Réel, 2015).
Supports/Surfaces: In the 1960’s this movement originally consisted of Claude Viallat, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, Marc Devade and Patrick Saytour, almost every one of them from the South of France. They interrogated the notions of deconstruction and reconstruction, examining the relationship a painting has to itself, as well as the space and context within which it functions. They critiqued painting as an object “to understand this envelope in which works of art invariably arrive” to borrow a phrase from Richard Wollheim. But despite its foundation in critique, the Supports/Surfaces group did not make antipaintings. It was in the interest of expanding the definition of painting that the group was formed, not in destroying it.
PRESS
July 11th, 2018 | The Brooklyn Rail |The Surface of the East Coast by Jonathan Goodman
