Michel Blazy
06 Feb - 07 Mar 2015
MICHEL BLAZY
Pull Over Time
6 February - 7 March 2015
The gallery is glad to present Pull Over Time, a personal exhibition by Michel Blazy that will run between the 6th of February and the 7th of March 2015. Coinciding with the publication of a monographic reference catalogue produced by the frac Île-deFrance and published by Manuella Editions retracing more than 20 years of creation, the exhibition proposes to re-enact the most emblematic pieces of Michel Blazy’s artistic career while putting emphasis on his new work.
As is often the case with Michel Blazy’s proposals, materials will at once be enhanced and strained within an exhibiting space that turns into a laboratory. In a subtle balance between mastery and randomness, and according to each substance’s properties and display conditions, materials evolve and transform during the exhibition’s space-and-time span. Akin to Robert Morris’s anti-form, or to Dieter Roth’s works and far from any static nature, Michel Blazy’s pieces could be described as space-and-time sensors that integrate hazard in the most unpredictable ways. The artists says: “I offer them time”. Whether it’s the wall that drinks or the bleach “drawings” or a moulding folded sweater, all his pieces undergo organic and chemical reactions – from capillarity to absorption and all the way to germination – as so many strategies of emancipation and survival of substance. Matter in all its states reveals the astonishing permeability of so called solid objects, that allow themselves to be impregnated and contaminated by fluids: plaster by dye, fibres by detergent and water. Instead of an “eating sculpture”*, we find a “wall that drinks”. Thus Arte Povera’s attitude is not that far away: both in the use of ordinary, organic and often rough materials and in the statement made by the humbleness of an artistic gesture that is opposed to luxurious and ostentatious art.
Set on sleek presentation-pedestals that look very much like the display units of a luxury boutique or showroom, the visitor discovers the artist’s latest productions; representing the world of electronics, a portable computer and a camera, representing the realm of prêt à porter, a series of sweaters available in three different colours. But the comparison ends here. Freed from the aesthetics of industry that is often polished and finished, the articles displayed are invaded by spontaneous vegetation and sport a blatant component of failure, an assumed malfunction. Their regeneration is due to the intervention of the vegetal world, a nature that resurges – much like the appliances that are left to decay on the sides of roads or along riverbeds. Escaping their planned obsolescence, these manufactured produces are freed from their conditioning and become the recipients of a new primitive and savage form of life. As is often the case with Michel Blazy’s work, living matter is at work and makes humorous use of the mechanisms of cultural and consumerist industries. Reminding us of the seventies’ ecological utopias, Michel Blazy thus affirms an innovative process for the treatment of discarded objects, a poetic recycling operation.
Eminently political, Michel Blazy’s artistic practice is similar to the concepts developed by French landscape architect and writer Gilles Clement, fostering what could be described as miniature “gardens of resistance”. His work not only questions the status of art and exhibition, but also our concept of time and the relationship of mankind to its environment, in an attempt to reconcile the eternal opposition between nature and culture.
Julia Mossé // Translation Frieda Schumann
*Reference to a work by Giovanni Anselmo, one of the greatest artists of the Arte Povera movement: Senza titolo (Scultura che mangia), 1968.
Michel Blazy was born in 1966 in Monaco. He lives and works in Paris. Solo shows : Flore Intestinale, Le Parvis - Scène nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées, Ibos (2014) ; Bouquet Final 3, National Gallery of Victoria, White Night, Melbourne (2013) ; Le Grand Restaurant, Frac Île-de-France, Paris (2012) ; Débordement domestique, Art : Concept, Paris (2012). Group shows: Constuire une collection, Villa Paloma, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2015) ; ROC, galerie du jour agnès b, Paris (2015) ; Le Mur, oeuvres de la collection Antoine de Galbert, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2014).
Pull Over Time
6 February - 7 March 2015
The gallery is glad to present Pull Over Time, a personal exhibition by Michel Blazy that will run between the 6th of February and the 7th of March 2015. Coinciding with the publication of a monographic reference catalogue produced by the frac Île-deFrance and published by Manuella Editions retracing more than 20 years of creation, the exhibition proposes to re-enact the most emblematic pieces of Michel Blazy’s artistic career while putting emphasis on his new work.
As is often the case with Michel Blazy’s proposals, materials will at once be enhanced and strained within an exhibiting space that turns into a laboratory. In a subtle balance between mastery and randomness, and according to each substance’s properties and display conditions, materials evolve and transform during the exhibition’s space-and-time span. Akin to Robert Morris’s anti-form, or to Dieter Roth’s works and far from any static nature, Michel Blazy’s pieces could be described as space-and-time sensors that integrate hazard in the most unpredictable ways. The artists says: “I offer them time”. Whether it’s the wall that drinks or the bleach “drawings” or a moulding folded sweater, all his pieces undergo organic and chemical reactions – from capillarity to absorption and all the way to germination – as so many strategies of emancipation and survival of substance. Matter in all its states reveals the astonishing permeability of so called solid objects, that allow themselves to be impregnated and contaminated by fluids: plaster by dye, fibres by detergent and water. Instead of an “eating sculpture”*, we find a “wall that drinks”. Thus Arte Povera’s attitude is not that far away: both in the use of ordinary, organic and often rough materials and in the statement made by the humbleness of an artistic gesture that is opposed to luxurious and ostentatious art.
Set on sleek presentation-pedestals that look very much like the display units of a luxury boutique or showroom, the visitor discovers the artist’s latest productions; representing the world of electronics, a portable computer and a camera, representing the realm of prêt à porter, a series of sweaters available in three different colours. But the comparison ends here. Freed from the aesthetics of industry that is often polished and finished, the articles displayed are invaded by spontaneous vegetation and sport a blatant component of failure, an assumed malfunction. Their regeneration is due to the intervention of the vegetal world, a nature that resurges – much like the appliances that are left to decay on the sides of roads or along riverbeds. Escaping their planned obsolescence, these manufactured produces are freed from their conditioning and become the recipients of a new primitive and savage form of life. As is often the case with Michel Blazy’s work, living matter is at work and makes humorous use of the mechanisms of cultural and consumerist industries. Reminding us of the seventies’ ecological utopias, Michel Blazy thus affirms an innovative process for the treatment of discarded objects, a poetic recycling operation.
Eminently political, Michel Blazy’s artistic practice is similar to the concepts developed by French landscape architect and writer Gilles Clement, fostering what could be described as miniature “gardens of resistance”. His work not only questions the status of art and exhibition, but also our concept of time and the relationship of mankind to its environment, in an attempt to reconcile the eternal opposition between nature and culture.
Julia Mossé // Translation Frieda Schumann
*Reference to a work by Giovanni Anselmo, one of the greatest artists of the Arte Povera movement: Senza titolo (Scultura che mangia), 1968.
Michel Blazy was born in 1966 in Monaco. He lives and works in Paris. Solo shows : Flore Intestinale, Le Parvis - Scène nationale Tarbes-Pyrénées, Ibos (2014) ; Bouquet Final 3, National Gallery of Victoria, White Night, Melbourne (2013) ; Le Grand Restaurant, Frac Île-de-France, Paris (2012) ; Débordement domestique, Art : Concept, Paris (2012). Group shows: Constuire une collection, Villa Paloma, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2015) ; ROC, galerie du jour agnès b, Paris (2015) ; Le Mur, oeuvres de la collection Antoine de Galbert, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2014).