Yvan Salomone
07 Nov - 20 Dec 2014
YVAN SALOMONE
The Secret Agent : Thinking of Allan Sekula
7 November - 20 December 2014
Albert Baronian is pleased to present the fourth exhibition of Yvan Salomone, entitled « The Secret Agent: Thinking of Allan Sekula », at the new gallery space at 33 Rue de la Concorde.
The exhibition will bring together a number of watercolors from Salomone’s latest series combined with photocopies of images derived from the artists’ archive. Seen by Salomone as ‘iconographic poems’, these images form the source for his watercolor paintings. Living in Saint Malo, it would seem evident that the scenes painted by Salomone are often harbor sites, a particular type of landscape and a recurrent motif in his work. However this would reduce the artist’s practice to a mere formal territory, as these landscapes do not correspond to just geographic realities but to a certain mental development traversed by a network of interruptions. Moreover, as access to these harbor sites has become severely restricted since 2001, Salomone has gone out to seek wider subjects, always containing a certain man-made element and exposing the so-called ‘nature natured’ (or the ‘nature naturée’, a term defined in Spinoza’s Ethics).
The title of the exhibition alludes to a novel by Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent , destined to be the theme of a joint exhibition of Salomone with Allan Sekula, which never went through. Salomone met Allan Sekula in 1994 at Witte de With in Rotterdam, where Salomone’s exhibition was followed with Fish Story, a photographic project by Sekula. Both artists share an interest in the representation of maritime space, a nearly lost tradition that few contemporary artists are continuing. In 2012 Salomone was invited by Allan Sekula to speak at a conference in Rennes, on the occasion of the latter’s solo exhibition at La Criée, The Docker’s Museum. As such this exhibition could be seen as a tribute to the American photographer, filmmaker and theorist who passed away in 2013.
Yvan Salomone was born in 1957 in Saint-Malo, France. He lives and works in Saint-Malo. Recent solo exhibitions include Ventriloque, L’Imagerie, Lannion (FR), Zone Blanche, galerie Xippas, Paris (FR), Retrospective Rudy Ricciotti, Cité de l'architecture, Paris (FR) and Ulysse et au-delà, LAC, Sigean (FR). His work was presented in many group exhibitions such as L’art en construction, FRAC Languedoc-Rousillon, (FR), Avec et sans peinture, nouvelle exposition des œuvres de la collection, MAC/VAL, Vitry sur Seine;(FR), Donation Florence et Daniel Guerlain, Centre Pompidou;(FR), Focus sur la couleur, Frac Haute-Normandie, Saint-Saêns, (FR), Ulysses/L'autre mer, Frac Bretagne, Rennes (FR), Cycle l'éternel détour, Mamco, Genève (CH) and Pratique 2: La couleur, Frac haute-Normandie, Rouen (FR).
The Secret Agent : Thinking of Allan Sekula
7 November - 20 December 2014
Albert Baronian is pleased to present the fourth exhibition of Yvan Salomone, entitled « The Secret Agent: Thinking of Allan Sekula », at the new gallery space at 33 Rue de la Concorde.
The exhibition will bring together a number of watercolors from Salomone’s latest series combined with photocopies of images derived from the artists’ archive. Seen by Salomone as ‘iconographic poems’, these images form the source for his watercolor paintings. Living in Saint Malo, it would seem evident that the scenes painted by Salomone are often harbor sites, a particular type of landscape and a recurrent motif in his work. However this would reduce the artist’s practice to a mere formal territory, as these landscapes do not correspond to just geographic realities but to a certain mental development traversed by a network of interruptions. Moreover, as access to these harbor sites has become severely restricted since 2001, Salomone has gone out to seek wider subjects, always containing a certain man-made element and exposing the so-called ‘nature natured’ (or the ‘nature naturée’, a term defined in Spinoza’s Ethics).
The title of the exhibition alludes to a novel by Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent , destined to be the theme of a joint exhibition of Salomone with Allan Sekula, which never went through. Salomone met Allan Sekula in 1994 at Witte de With in Rotterdam, where Salomone’s exhibition was followed with Fish Story, a photographic project by Sekula. Both artists share an interest in the representation of maritime space, a nearly lost tradition that few contemporary artists are continuing. In 2012 Salomone was invited by Allan Sekula to speak at a conference in Rennes, on the occasion of the latter’s solo exhibition at La Criée, The Docker’s Museum. As such this exhibition could be seen as a tribute to the American photographer, filmmaker and theorist who passed away in 2013.
Yvan Salomone was born in 1957 in Saint-Malo, France. He lives and works in Saint-Malo. Recent solo exhibitions include Ventriloque, L’Imagerie, Lannion (FR), Zone Blanche, galerie Xippas, Paris (FR), Retrospective Rudy Ricciotti, Cité de l'architecture, Paris (FR) and Ulysse et au-delà, LAC, Sigean (FR). His work was presented in many group exhibitions such as L’art en construction, FRAC Languedoc-Rousillon, (FR), Avec et sans peinture, nouvelle exposition des œuvres de la collection, MAC/VAL, Vitry sur Seine;(FR), Donation Florence et Daniel Guerlain, Centre Pompidou;(FR), Focus sur la couleur, Frac Haute-Normandie, Saint-Saêns, (FR), Ulysses/L'autre mer, Frac Bretagne, Rennes (FR), Cycle l'éternel détour, Mamco, Genève (CH) and Pratique 2: La couleur, Frac haute-Normandie, Rouen (FR).