À corps et à textes

[Through Body & Text]

2 jun 2009
25 jul 2009
  • La Galerie
  • 1, rue Jean Jaurès, F-93130 Noisy-le-Sec

The exhibition À corps & à textes [Through Body & Text] explores the contradictory yet creative relationship between the narrative, poetic and analytic potentialities of writing, investigating their wide spectrum of manifestations and their experimental results in the practice of seven international artists.

Vergroot

Michael Dean - Untitled, c-print, 2008

The conceptual framework of À corps & à textes could be described as a fragile equilibrium between coexisting strategies of employing written words as a motor for artistic creation: from an exquisite rarefaction of the art object through subjective narrations to an analytic investigation of language as a medium for regaining the physicality of the work itself. The heterogeneous pieces presented by the artists position themselves between these major attitudes: in the interstices of writing as 'dematerialising power' and in the folds of 'lettering as sculpting'.

The existence of endless poetic shadings, as countless as the narratives used by the artists in recollecting fragments of reality as a basis for their work, can transmute the most subjective everyday account into mythology and the most scrupulous analysis of a text into a physical object. Writing is the filrouge that connects these extremes, creating a fluid field of encounters for the works on show.

Guest curator: Francesco Pedraglio,
in the framework of La Galerie's annual residency for curators

The seven international artists:
Orla Barry, Michael Dean, Clare Gasson, Falke Pisano,
Reto Pulfer, Alexandre Singh, Richard T. Walker