Simon Nicaise
03 Jun - 16 Jul 2016
SIMON NICAISE
Art Thérapie
3 June - 16 July 2016
Albert Baronian is pleased to announce the first exhibition of Simon Nicais entitled “Art Thérapie”.
Simon Nicaise: Art Therapy. A professional plaque on the outside wall announces the gallery as reconverted into a practitioner's surgery. Simon Nicaise, art therapist? Or rather Simon Nicaise, artist who plans that no-one will leave this exhibition cured. Because while the adopted position proclaims that art can cure evils, the exhibition further simulates the mechanisms of this activity and transfers stereotypes to it. The problems relating to the affects will not become a science.
Made up in the guise of a room where a therapist practices, the exhibition is oriented towards a resolutely pertinent interpretation of the pieces present, while at the same time the artist works on leading us down the wrong track. He claims to give the keys to his own work whilst stealing them at the same time.
A triangular heap condensing all the rubbish of the place, winter cherries circled by reinforced concrete, Carl Andre's squares parasitized by an additional unit, the space is squared by so many elementary forms where disorder, tension and accident are at work.
Whilst it may be difficult to qualify its aesthetics, one seldom struggles to recognize a work by Simon Nicaise. Drenched with the history of art, his practice of sculpture and the object seem to be owed as much to his visits to museums as to joke shops. Often resulting from the diversion of a daily object of which he cancels its use, of which he turns the revolving, semantic meaning with a simple contrivance, his art could be at the intersection of the ready-made and prestidigitation.
Simon Nicaise creates sculptures which are visual puns, wordplay taking a plastic form. He gives power to the objects, whose mastery can, at any moment, escape him and the subject is emancipated. By coupling forms, materials, situations, he associates elements which, in some way, contradict each other, add up or cancel each other out and, from there, give birth to a new poetic reality. Borrowing in his pieces pre-existing objects, either produced by industry, or of the order of the artistic field, Simon Nicaise proceeds by operations for which the often complex technical device becomes rather discrete.
He thus turns the internal logic of the objects, the elements, the matter, upside down. Investing them, hence, with a new way, with a new reading direction, he charges them with a poetic power.
His work has something of the labyrinth: simplicity of the layout for maximum cognitive confusion. What one recognizes in his work, is that the daily objects lead to dead ends or make us laugh at the here and now. The artist assumes and asserts this status of sorcerer's apprentice, who plays tricks on others and on himself, and extirpates the familiar ordinary meaning.
Simon Nicaise (born in 1982 in Rouen, lives in Paris) graduated from the Rouen School of Fine Arts in 2008. Winner of the 2009 Jeune Création prize, then the 2011 Science Po Prize for contemporary art, he takes part in many private and collective exhibitions in galleries, institutions and art centres in France and abroad (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Lithuania, Thailand), notably of which Seconde Main at the Museum of Modern Art City of Paris in 2010. His associative engagement leads him to create and direct the Stork Gallery in Rouen with Morgane Fourey from 2008 to 2011, then to found in 2012 the Web radio *DUUU - Unités Radiophoniques Mobiles of which he is a member of the steering committee.
Art Thérapie
3 June - 16 July 2016
Albert Baronian is pleased to announce the first exhibition of Simon Nicais entitled “Art Thérapie”.
Simon Nicaise: Art Therapy. A professional plaque on the outside wall announces the gallery as reconverted into a practitioner's surgery. Simon Nicaise, art therapist? Or rather Simon Nicaise, artist who plans that no-one will leave this exhibition cured. Because while the adopted position proclaims that art can cure evils, the exhibition further simulates the mechanisms of this activity and transfers stereotypes to it. The problems relating to the affects will not become a science.
Made up in the guise of a room where a therapist practices, the exhibition is oriented towards a resolutely pertinent interpretation of the pieces present, while at the same time the artist works on leading us down the wrong track. He claims to give the keys to his own work whilst stealing them at the same time.
A triangular heap condensing all the rubbish of the place, winter cherries circled by reinforced concrete, Carl Andre's squares parasitized by an additional unit, the space is squared by so many elementary forms where disorder, tension and accident are at work.
Whilst it may be difficult to qualify its aesthetics, one seldom struggles to recognize a work by Simon Nicaise. Drenched with the history of art, his practice of sculpture and the object seem to be owed as much to his visits to museums as to joke shops. Often resulting from the diversion of a daily object of which he cancels its use, of which he turns the revolving, semantic meaning with a simple contrivance, his art could be at the intersection of the ready-made and prestidigitation.
Simon Nicaise creates sculptures which are visual puns, wordplay taking a plastic form. He gives power to the objects, whose mastery can, at any moment, escape him and the subject is emancipated. By coupling forms, materials, situations, he associates elements which, in some way, contradict each other, add up or cancel each other out and, from there, give birth to a new poetic reality. Borrowing in his pieces pre-existing objects, either produced by industry, or of the order of the artistic field, Simon Nicaise proceeds by operations for which the often complex technical device becomes rather discrete.
He thus turns the internal logic of the objects, the elements, the matter, upside down. Investing them, hence, with a new way, with a new reading direction, he charges them with a poetic power.
His work has something of the labyrinth: simplicity of the layout for maximum cognitive confusion. What one recognizes in his work, is that the daily objects lead to dead ends or make us laugh at the here and now. The artist assumes and asserts this status of sorcerer's apprentice, who plays tricks on others and on himself, and extirpates the familiar ordinary meaning.
Simon Nicaise (born in 1982 in Rouen, lives in Paris) graduated from the Rouen School of Fine Arts in 2008. Winner of the 2009 Jeune Création prize, then the 2011 Science Po Prize for contemporary art, he takes part in many private and collective exhibitions in galleries, institutions and art centres in France and abroad (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Lithuania, Thailand), notably of which Seconde Main at the Museum of Modern Art City of Paris in 2010. His associative engagement leads him to create and direct the Stork Gallery in Rouen with Morgane Fourey from 2008 to 2011, then to found in 2012 the Web radio *DUUU - Unités Radiophoniques Mobiles of which he is a member of the steering committee.