Imagining an exhibition space means embodying it. The artists, their work as well as the architecture and the spirit of the place, carry this incarnation. The inaugural exhibition Volutes invites Pierre Bourrigault, Will Mac Bride, Dana Cojbuc, Lee Hope, Lobsang, Jean-Marc Meloux, Camille Vignaud, Billie Zahal and Selma Bella Zarhloul to inhabit this one-season venue, La Volante.
Volutes echoes the favorite figure of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker: “the spiral, a geometric figure but it is also a figure of life, the figure of a certain conception of life. You turn, you change, then you find yourself on the same site as at the start; but no longer quite in the same place”. The interior displacement in the closed and delimited white cube of the gallery. The guest artists inhabit, each embody this space. with their language at the edge of the borders that they draw, move and blur. There is a lot of talk about physical and mental landscape, land and horizon, dream and phantasmagoria, memory and oblivion.
Thus Dana Cojbuc and her tumultuous forests between real and imaginary that she extends to the drawing, of Lobsang who pushes the landscape towards a meditative pictorial flatness. Pierre Bourrigault poses the delicate features of the poetry of the shores. Billie Zahal slips into the ancestral existence of the tree that she confronts with the ephemeral human scale. Camille Vignaud summons “the memorial imprints of the time that passes” and writes herself in our body by means of the photogram dear to Man Ray. Will Mac Bride captures this sensitive moment of change between childhood and adolescence, which the body transpires. The body again in Selma Bella Zarhloul’s work, naked, absolved in the landscape or fragmented to the point of abstraction. While from 1976, Jean-Marc Meloux, faithful to his surrealist spirit, plays with the representation of oneself and “Masks”.
La Volante is an old story, but it never passed. One of those childhood dreams that you carry with you like a blessing, the one that pushes you to realize them, or a curse, the thing that taunts you out of reach. And then, you go along year after year: when? how? where? who? Certainties, discouragements, but always this idea well in you, moving in the game of the hot and the cold: there you heat, there…
One unforeseeable day, the meeting takes place. Everything converges, magic is invited, the skies dart you with their benevolent stars, the firmament points its pretty muzzle E la nave va!
