Richard Fauguet
13 Mar - 18 Apr 2015
RICHARD FAUGUET
Bivalve & Monocouche
13 March - 18 April 2015
Between the 13th March and the 18th April 2015, Art : Concept will present Bivalve & Monocouche, a unique exhibition featuring Richard Fauguet. After his 2003 Châtaigne et vin blanc exhibition, this show, which could have been titled, not without irony: “Le cubi et le visage”*, will allow us to re-discover the hybrid and dual character typical of the artist’s universe. From the busts covered with game-marbles (1997) to the coconut-heads (2000), from his Tipp-Ex drawings to the postcards with pouring-spout appendages (2007-2013), the emergence of dual imagery crosses the greatest part of his work.
The exhibition space will be constructed like an enigmatic landscape split in two: A yellow, almost chemical-looking sea on one side, on which women’s heads seem to float in an invasive movement of flooding of the gallery’s floor. A shelf full of glassplate drawings provides a line of horizon. On an aesthetic level, duality is expressed as much by the glass drawings, with their games of cast shadows on the wall creating doubles, as by the series of clay heads, for which double-valve mollusks have been selected and into which the empty shells have been embedded. Some of these heads are double, just like the God Janus, while others seem to stare at their own reflection in the bag on which they rest, in an attitude that seems to eco the myth of Narcissus. One way or another, all of them have two faces. They are figures of hybridism: fish-and-woman, alien-and-woman or gorgon-and-woman. They almost seem to follow an extremely classical sculptural pattern: However, the materials and techniques employed – double-valve shells of all sorts that have been consumed by the artist and then grafted into the clay to create heads – points at procedures that make them more akin to collages than to a sculptural practice in its traditional sense. Similarly, his drawings often are reassembled scraps of papers that have been torn out of magazines with the help of adhesive strips.
The exhibition as a whole tends to function as a mental collage that assembles a great diversity of universes, imaging systems and seemingly antithetic references: sea and land, antiquity versus Rocaille, the nobleness of an art opposed to the triviality of the materials employed. The result is the production of a rococo yet poor line of aesthetics. Both in his drawings and in his sculptures, Richard Fauguet revisits the most classical poses, with the help of glossy fashion magazines as far as the drawings are concerned, and with the help of the embossing effects of a fish-based tasting menu when it comes to sculpture. This work recalls his 2012 play-dough series based on the portraits of Picasso’s partners, but things are a little different here: The celebrity-pantheon has given way to women from his entourage as well as perfect strangers. The coexistence of marine creatures, or rather what is left of them, with clay heads severed from their bodies, allows Richard Fauguet to propose a deviant version of the myth of Medusa, in which the Gorgon is coupled with its petrified victim. Fixed into blocks of clay but deliberately not solidified by cooking, these heads are not dissimilar to the skulls produced by some of the rituals of the Paleolithic, in which skulls were covered with shells in what looked like an attempt to deny the disappearance of the face. Reference to these cults, which in Georges Didi’s Huberman’s opinion were contemporary of the first forms of portrait, inscribes the artist’s work within the history of portraiture since its origin: “ The tradition of portrait maybe began the day when our eyes looked down with terror and dismay at a loved and familiar face fallen to the floor and never to get up again.”**
Julia Mossé // Translation Frieda Schumann
* Play on words referring to Georges Didi-Huberman’s text: “The Cube and the Face” written in 1993, about a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. Here the word “cube” has been substitued with the word “cubi” (the“Bag-in-Box” type of container often used for cheap wine)
** Georges Didi-Huberman: “Le Visage et la Terre” in Artstudio, summer 1991, n°21
Richard Fauguet was born in 1962 in La Châtre. He lives and works in Châteauroux. His work has been purchased by numerous public collections among which: Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Frac Île-de-France, Paris; Frac Limousin, Limoges; MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse. Several personal exhibitions have been consecrated to his work in the last years: Vivement demain, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (2012) ; Selon Arrivage, Art : Concept, Paris (2011) ; Ni vu, ni Connu, Frac Limousin, Limoges (2011) ; Pas vu, pas pris, frac Île-de-France, Paris (2009).
Bivalve & Monocouche
13 March - 18 April 2015
Between the 13th March and the 18th April 2015, Art : Concept will present Bivalve & Monocouche, a unique exhibition featuring Richard Fauguet. After his 2003 Châtaigne et vin blanc exhibition, this show, which could have been titled, not without irony: “Le cubi et le visage”*, will allow us to re-discover the hybrid and dual character typical of the artist’s universe. From the busts covered with game-marbles (1997) to the coconut-heads (2000), from his Tipp-Ex drawings to the postcards with pouring-spout appendages (2007-2013), the emergence of dual imagery crosses the greatest part of his work.
The exhibition space will be constructed like an enigmatic landscape split in two: A yellow, almost chemical-looking sea on one side, on which women’s heads seem to float in an invasive movement of flooding of the gallery’s floor. A shelf full of glassplate drawings provides a line of horizon. On an aesthetic level, duality is expressed as much by the glass drawings, with their games of cast shadows on the wall creating doubles, as by the series of clay heads, for which double-valve mollusks have been selected and into which the empty shells have been embedded. Some of these heads are double, just like the God Janus, while others seem to stare at their own reflection in the bag on which they rest, in an attitude that seems to eco the myth of Narcissus. One way or another, all of them have two faces. They are figures of hybridism: fish-and-woman, alien-and-woman or gorgon-and-woman. They almost seem to follow an extremely classical sculptural pattern: However, the materials and techniques employed – double-valve shells of all sorts that have been consumed by the artist and then grafted into the clay to create heads – points at procedures that make them more akin to collages than to a sculptural practice in its traditional sense. Similarly, his drawings often are reassembled scraps of papers that have been torn out of magazines with the help of adhesive strips.
The exhibition as a whole tends to function as a mental collage that assembles a great diversity of universes, imaging systems and seemingly antithetic references: sea and land, antiquity versus Rocaille, the nobleness of an art opposed to the triviality of the materials employed. The result is the production of a rococo yet poor line of aesthetics. Both in his drawings and in his sculptures, Richard Fauguet revisits the most classical poses, with the help of glossy fashion magazines as far as the drawings are concerned, and with the help of the embossing effects of a fish-based tasting menu when it comes to sculpture. This work recalls his 2012 play-dough series based on the portraits of Picasso’s partners, but things are a little different here: The celebrity-pantheon has given way to women from his entourage as well as perfect strangers. The coexistence of marine creatures, or rather what is left of them, with clay heads severed from their bodies, allows Richard Fauguet to propose a deviant version of the myth of Medusa, in which the Gorgon is coupled with its petrified victim. Fixed into blocks of clay but deliberately not solidified by cooking, these heads are not dissimilar to the skulls produced by some of the rituals of the Paleolithic, in which skulls were covered with shells in what looked like an attempt to deny the disappearance of the face. Reference to these cults, which in Georges Didi’s Huberman’s opinion were contemporary of the first forms of portrait, inscribes the artist’s work within the history of portraiture since its origin: “ The tradition of portrait maybe began the day when our eyes looked down with terror and dismay at a loved and familiar face fallen to the floor and never to get up again.”**
Julia Mossé // Translation Frieda Schumann
* Play on words referring to Georges Didi-Huberman’s text: “The Cube and the Face” written in 1993, about a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. Here the word “cube” has been substitued with the word “cubi” (the“Bag-in-Box” type of container often used for cheap wine)
** Georges Didi-Huberman: “Le Visage et la Terre” in Artstudio, summer 1991, n°21
Richard Fauguet was born in 1962 in La Châtre. He lives and works in Châteauroux. His work has been purchased by numerous public collections among which: Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Frac Île-de-France, Paris; Frac Limousin, Limoges; MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse. Several personal exhibitions have been consecrated to his work in the last years: Vivement demain, MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (2012) ; Selon Arrivage, Art : Concept, Paris (2011) ; Ni vu, ni Connu, Frac Limousin, Limoges (2011) ; Pas vu, pas pris, frac Île-de-France, Paris (2009).