Kendell Geers
26 Apr - 31 May 2014
KENDELL GEERS
Solve et Coagula
26 April – 31 May 2014
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Kendell Geers third solo show Solve et Coagula which will be held at the gallery from April 26th to May 31st. In this exhibition, South African artist presents a new selection of works, which question the relation between art creation and transgression by using different medias such as paintings, installations and performance.
Beyond all idea of Beauty or romantic form of Sublime, Kendell Geers’s work interferes with in the experience of the spectator as an appearance of a fantasy of violence. Strongly influenced by the political context he comes from, Kendell Geers transforms his artistic production into an act of a potential fraction towards history and art history. For this exhibition Kendell Geers confronts us with a necessary break, which is preliminary to all reconstruction. In terms of alchemy, the maxim of Solve et Coagula signifies the inevitable dissolution of a body before its transfiguration into spirit. Also, during the performance Ritual Resist — which is directed by the artist —, the dancer’s bodies initiate a dialogue of power with their own image, held prisoner by their reflection. Equally inspired by the theory of the Ligne de Fuite of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Kendell Geers situates us in a place of instability which is both spatial and social, and where the spectator is led to take almost an ethical position. Indeed, his large paintings detain us by their tribal looking motives, by which Kendell Geers plunges us into a real Theatre of Cruelty. Also, the troubling image of the swings who’s seat is set of broken glass, undeniably sends us back to Fragonard’s famous painting Les Hasard Heureux de l’escarpolette (The Swing), a metaphor of the moral decline of nobility a few years before the revolution in 1789.
Each work of the artist comes within the context of a form of a sensitive experience of a limit, in which the shades of an account, tormented by contemporary history, appear.
Ritual Resist will be performed during the opening on April 26th from 6 p.m.
Kendell lives and works. He was born in May 1968.
His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions : Vienna Secession and MAK in Vienna, AT ; Würtembergischer Kunstverein and Schloss Solitude de Stuttgart, DE ; MACRO à Rome, IT ; MART – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, IT ; Castello di Ama per l’arte contemporanea Lecchi in Chianti, IT ; Proyecto de arte contemporaneo, Murcia, ES ; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent, BE ; at BPS 22 à Charleroi, BE ; in Basel for an Unlimited project, CH ; Salon 94, New York, US ; South African National Gallery, Cape Town, ZA ; Consortium de Dijon, FR ; Musée d’Art contemporainde lYon, FR and au Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR
He participated in several collective shows Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL ; de Appel Art Center, Amsterdam, NL ; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE ; Documenta 11, Kassel, DE ; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE ; Kunstlerhaus, Graz, AT ; Kunsthalle Bern, CH ; MNAC, Bucharest, RO ; Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, PT ; MUHKA, Antwerp, BE ; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK ; 52nd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, IT ; Villa Medici, Rome, IT ; Le Magasin, Grenoble, FR ; Collection François Pinault Foundation, Lille, FR ; Collection Yvon Lambert, Avignon, FR ; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR et au PS1, New York, US.
Political-Erotical-Mystical-Manifesto
Be aware, There Be Dragons
Respect the demons, trust the angels, be aware of the in between
Pray, prey, seed, sing, punk, pain, good, evil, shit, piss, dick, cunt, love, hate, need, lust and fuck are all four letter words for good reason
Take Time, Give Space
Art is made out of the debris in the head-on collision of reality and the imagination
Every artist should write their manifesto at least once in each lifetime
Every manifesto is valid only for the time of writing and thereafter begins to expire
My body and all its scars, wrinkles, odours, liquids, desires and process cannot be ugly
If you don t know your real name, you cannot give birth to your true self !
Life does not have a backup or a guarantee and is lived forwards in real time only
Believe in what you create and create only what you believe in
Language, violence, sexuality, politics, history, contradiction, subjectivity, expressionism, excess, love, faith and natural magick
Radicalise subjectivity and revolutionise objectivity
The sole task of the artist should be to spiritualise matter and materialise spirit
Re-Lease your Mind, Occupy your body, Feed in to your Spirit
Create with your heart, listen with your eyes and feel without thinking
Cleanse the doors of your perception to open your heart unto the darkness with your eyes focussed on the blinding light of contradiction
Embrace opposition without reconciliation
Update faith with contradiction
Forge Dissent upon the anvils of desire
Only violence produces change
Loose ends start fires
Knowing when to stop is half the problem
Surrender to the extreme
Risk everything without fear, transgress without limits, crisscrossing every border
The body never lies, spirit never dies, Celebrate sex blindly
Let go to take control
Read the signs with respect to the laws of chance
Transgression is the code if you respect the secret
Seek out your true nature beyond the safety of habit and convention Discomfort is the canary inside the goldmine of consumption Sexuality is key, fear the lock
Fuck, its true !
Unnatural Laws should be broken, Natural Laws respected Living art cannot be made without lived experiences Transmute the lead of experience into the golden art Without Magick, there is no Art
Every artist should start as an alchemist and every alchemist as an artist
Knowledge cannot be taught and starts within Information is not knowledge, knowing is not intelligence Art fairs are foul money laundering machines
Locate the talisman in capitalism
Use counter-culture to counter the culture of the counter
Art galleries are aesthetic stock exchanges
Relational ethics are the cornerstone of aesthetics
The work of art is the totem pole around which the system dances and not the other way round
KENDELL GEERS
Solve et Coagula
April 26th - May 31st
The price of art is a worthless indication of the artist s socio-political use value, nothing more
Contaminate art fairs with the virus of vision and charge of faith
The art market is a habit forming drug that will inevitably crash and burn
Curators and collectors are an occupation hazard to be kept a broken arm s length away
Withdraw work from the market periodically
Everything is not for sale
In the art market nobody wants to hear your scream All art is political, conceptual, mystical and erotic Never trust a frustrated artist
Creation is a political-erotical-mystical art that resists convention and protests assimilation
Cinema has made our imaginations lazy and television is its tombstone
I believe in an art of the imagination that can change the world, one perception at a time
Truth exists only within the imagination
Thought is already a second hand experience Prioritise the primary
Truth is only one point of view
Truth is not always beautiful or positive
Nothing is more important to the work of art than the work of art
Art about art is not about art
A bad idea cannot be improved upon with assistants or good techniques
Help the world by scratching where it does not itch Shake the tree of life until the monkeys fall out Slick art inevitable slips
Reduce work to essential basics Simplicity is the only sophistication Simplify the simple with simplicity
Excess and ecstasy cleanse the spirit from the quotidian grind
Risk everything with excess History is written by the winner Free Time
Art Unfolds, Unpack its history
Habit is a mind killer and comfort its alibi
Ethical artists should be amoral History is not evolutionary Dance around the revolution Recycle revolutions periodically Write, Rite, Riot, Rot !
If you don t know your history you are doomed to plagiarise it
Spell Mistakes
Theory must never outstrip performance
Common sense for common people
Speak with a sharp tongue in the cheek of expectations
Love is above the law, under will
Make art, like love
Humility and sincerity inspire integrity
Destruction should be in equal balance with creation
Use repetition as a mantra until meaning is transformed into Dark Matter
Trance Form
Less found objects and more profound art with more objections
Meaning is a fluid that should never be contained
Art should be transformative or not at all
The work of art is not created but conjured into existence The work of art can never be reduced to the sum of its parts Cynicism is a stupid surrender
Cynicism and parody destroy true creation
Find the courage to step outside from the crowd and grow tall in the Shit
Embrace kings and queens with the same passion and whores and fools.
KENDELL GEERS
Solve et Coagula
April 26th - May 31st
If it can be explained, it should not be created. If it can be said, it need not be made
Create with silence and from emptiness
Fashions Dictate, then destroy dissent
One-Liners and novelty expire when fashions fade The artist should be socially responsive but never socially responsible
Look down, look up, dive in, upside down, inside out Past, present, future and all here, now, nowhere Time is energy
Reality is just another illusion, to bite
Break open the head and surrender to your animal, vegetable and mineral minds
Language is a divine curse
Breath with spirit
Baptise your self with fire
Let Nature be your mentor and chance your guide
Inner gods we trust
Embrace human error with divine relish
Every fear is an invitation, Every mistake an opportunity
Uncomfortable solutions work
Send holy cows to the rodeo and the bullshit to the matador
Kill your Idols, with pleasure
Everything is connected and interconnected God lives in the details and the Devil in design Surrender to the bigger picture
Speak the unspoken, pronounce the unmentionable, invoke the indescribable
Every city is local
Love Yours elf
Be auty I snot en ough
Punk snot dead
Burn once, read and destroy
The plague is me
Solve et Coagula
26 April – 31 May 2014
Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce Kendell Geers third solo show Solve et Coagula which will be held at the gallery from April 26th to May 31st. In this exhibition, South African artist presents a new selection of works, which question the relation between art creation and transgression by using different medias such as paintings, installations and performance.
Beyond all idea of Beauty or romantic form of Sublime, Kendell Geers’s work interferes with in the experience of the spectator as an appearance of a fantasy of violence. Strongly influenced by the political context he comes from, Kendell Geers transforms his artistic production into an act of a potential fraction towards history and art history. For this exhibition Kendell Geers confronts us with a necessary break, which is preliminary to all reconstruction. In terms of alchemy, the maxim of Solve et Coagula signifies the inevitable dissolution of a body before its transfiguration into spirit. Also, during the performance Ritual Resist — which is directed by the artist —, the dancer’s bodies initiate a dialogue of power with their own image, held prisoner by their reflection. Equally inspired by the theory of the Ligne de Fuite of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Kendell Geers situates us in a place of instability which is both spatial and social, and where the spectator is led to take almost an ethical position. Indeed, his large paintings detain us by their tribal looking motives, by which Kendell Geers plunges us into a real Theatre of Cruelty. Also, the troubling image of the swings who’s seat is set of broken glass, undeniably sends us back to Fragonard’s famous painting Les Hasard Heureux de l’escarpolette (The Swing), a metaphor of the moral decline of nobility a few years before the revolution in 1789.
Each work of the artist comes within the context of a form of a sensitive experience of a limit, in which the shades of an account, tormented by contemporary history, appear.
Ritual Resist will be performed during the opening on April 26th from 6 p.m.
Kendell lives and works. He was born in May 1968.
His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions : Vienna Secession and MAK in Vienna, AT ; Würtembergischer Kunstverein and Schloss Solitude de Stuttgart, DE ; MACRO à Rome, IT ; MART – Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, IT ; Castello di Ama per l’arte contemporanea Lecchi in Chianti, IT ; Proyecto de arte contemporaneo, Murcia, ES ; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Gent, BE ; at BPS 22 à Charleroi, BE ; in Basel for an Unlimited project, CH ; Salon 94, New York, US ; South African National Gallery, Cape Town, ZA ; Consortium de Dijon, FR ; Musée d’Art contemporainde lYon, FR and au Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR
He participated in several collective shows Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL ; de Appel Art Center, Amsterdam, NL ; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, DE ; Documenta 11, Kassel, DE ; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE ; Kunstlerhaus, Graz, AT ; Kunsthalle Bern, CH ; MNAC, Bucharest, RO ; Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon, PT ; MUHKA, Antwerp, BE ; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK ; 52nd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, IT ; Villa Medici, Rome, IT ; Le Magasin, Grenoble, FR ; Collection François Pinault Foundation, Lille, FR ; Collection Yvon Lambert, Avignon, FR ; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR et au PS1, New York, US.
Political-Erotical-Mystical-Manifesto
Be aware, There Be Dragons
Respect the demons, trust the angels, be aware of the in between
Pray, prey, seed, sing, punk, pain, good, evil, shit, piss, dick, cunt, love, hate, need, lust and fuck are all four letter words for good reason
Take Time, Give Space
Art is made out of the debris in the head-on collision of reality and the imagination
Every artist should write their manifesto at least once in each lifetime
Every manifesto is valid only for the time of writing and thereafter begins to expire
My body and all its scars, wrinkles, odours, liquids, desires and process cannot be ugly
If you don t know your real name, you cannot give birth to your true self !
Life does not have a backup or a guarantee and is lived forwards in real time only
Believe in what you create and create only what you believe in
Language, violence, sexuality, politics, history, contradiction, subjectivity, expressionism, excess, love, faith and natural magick
Radicalise subjectivity and revolutionise objectivity
The sole task of the artist should be to spiritualise matter and materialise spirit
Re-Lease your Mind, Occupy your body, Feed in to your Spirit
Create with your heart, listen with your eyes and feel without thinking
Cleanse the doors of your perception to open your heart unto the darkness with your eyes focussed on the blinding light of contradiction
Embrace opposition without reconciliation
Update faith with contradiction
Forge Dissent upon the anvils of desire
Only violence produces change
Loose ends start fires
Knowing when to stop is half the problem
Surrender to the extreme
Risk everything without fear, transgress without limits, crisscrossing every border
The body never lies, spirit never dies, Celebrate sex blindly
Let go to take control
Read the signs with respect to the laws of chance
Transgression is the code if you respect the secret
Seek out your true nature beyond the safety of habit and convention Discomfort is the canary inside the goldmine of consumption Sexuality is key, fear the lock
Fuck, its true !
Unnatural Laws should be broken, Natural Laws respected Living art cannot be made without lived experiences Transmute the lead of experience into the golden art Without Magick, there is no Art
Every artist should start as an alchemist and every alchemist as an artist
Knowledge cannot be taught and starts within Information is not knowledge, knowing is not intelligence Art fairs are foul money laundering machines
Locate the talisman in capitalism
Use counter-culture to counter the culture of the counter
Art galleries are aesthetic stock exchanges
Relational ethics are the cornerstone of aesthetics
The work of art is the totem pole around which the system dances and not the other way round
KENDELL GEERS
Solve et Coagula
April 26th - May 31st
The price of art is a worthless indication of the artist s socio-political use value, nothing more
Contaminate art fairs with the virus of vision and charge of faith
The art market is a habit forming drug that will inevitably crash and burn
Curators and collectors are an occupation hazard to be kept a broken arm s length away
Withdraw work from the market periodically
Everything is not for sale
In the art market nobody wants to hear your scream All art is political, conceptual, mystical and erotic Never trust a frustrated artist
Creation is a political-erotical-mystical art that resists convention and protests assimilation
Cinema has made our imaginations lazy and television is its tombstone
I believe in an art of the imagination that can change the world, one perception at a time
Truth exists only within the imagination
Thought is already a second hand experience Prioritise the primary
Truth is only one point of view
Truth is not always beautiful or positive
Nothing is more important to the work of art than the work of art
Art about art is not about art
A bad idea cannot be improved upon with assistants or good techniques
Help the world by scratching where it does not itch Shake the tree of life until the monkeys fall out Slick art inevitable slips
Reduce work to essential basics Simplicity is the only sophistication Simplify the simple with simplicity
Excess and ecstasy cleanse the spirit from the quotidian grind
Risk everything with excess History is written by the winner Free Time
Art Unfolds, Unpack its history
Habit is a mind killer and comfort its alibi
Ethical artists should be amoral History is not evolutionary Dance around the revolution Recycle revolutions periodically Write, Rite, Riot, Rot !
If you don t know your history you are doomed to plagiarise it
Spell Mistakes
Theory must never outstrip performance
Common sense for common people
Speak with a sharp tongue in the cheek of expectations
Love is above the law, under will
Make art, like love
Humility and sincerity inspire integrity
Destruction should be in equal balance with creation
Use repetition as a mantra until meaning is transformed into Dark Matter
Trance Form
Less found objects and more profound art with more objections
Meaning is a fluid that should never be contained
Art should be transformative or not at all
The work of art is not created but conjured into existence The work of art can never be reduced to the sum of its parts Cynicism is a stupid surrender
Cynicism and parody destroy true creation
Find the courage to step outside from the crowd and grow tall in the Shit
Embrace kings and queens with the same passion and whores and fools.
KENDELL GEERS
Solve et Coagula
April 26th - May 31st
If it can be explained, it should not be created. If it can be said, it need not be made
Create with silence and from emptiness
Fashions Dictate, then destroy dissent
One-Liners and novelty expire when fashions fade The artist should be socially responsive but never socially responsible
Look down, look up, dive in, upside down, inside out Past, present, future and all here, now, nowhere Time is energy
Reality is just another illusion, to bite
Break open the head and surrender to your animal, vegetable and mineral minds
Language is a divine curse
Breath with spirit
Baptise your self with fire
Let Nature be your mentor and chance your guide
Inner gods we trust
Embrace human error with divine relish
Every fear is an invitation, Every mistake an opportunity
Uncomfortable solutions work
Send holy cows to the rodeo and the bullshit to the matador
Kill your Idols, with pleasure
Everything is connected and interconnected God lives in the details and the Devil in design Surrender to the bigger picture
Speak the unspoken, pronounce the unmentionable, invoke the indescribable
Every city is local
Love Yours elf
Be auty I snot en ough
Punk snot dead
Burn once, read and destroy
The plague is me