Vernon Projekt – Pauline Bastard / Ivan Argote – The rising action

Praha, 2.4.2010


THE RISING ACTION

The French artist Pauline Bastard draws on an analysis of the dramatist Gustav Freytag for her exhibition for Vernon Projekt. The well-known Freytag pyramid illustrating dramatic structure divides the play into five stages - exposition, rising action, crisis, falling action, denouement. Pauline Bastard is primarily interested in the stage of rising action, where tension is evoked in the play and needs to be solved. How can this model be applied to conceptual works? Does it like the dramatic work retain the unity of action, place, and time?

Pauline Bastard was born in 1982 in Rouen. She received her diploma from the Paris Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and has continued to live and work in Paris. She has been an artist-in-residence at Mains d´Oeuvres since June 2009 and has recently exposed work with Roman Signer (Paris).

The radical stakes of Pauline Bastard´s work are articulated around the material constraints of the quotidian. She creates works as ephemeral as they are powerful, easily identifiable, which give new life to familiar objects and breach the boundaries between genres with a humor of great originality. Her pieces are situated in an intermediary space, somewhere between life and its representation ; they produce strange encounters and permit the rediscovery of the quotidian. Created using thrown-away objects, of no value in the eyes of consumer society, her little sculptures move, turn, or propel water and come to discreetly inhabit our space. Their hidden motors diffuse the only sound : monotone, mechanical, reinforcing the timid presence of these ordinary objects, which take on a role as new as it is surprising. These interventions, this recycling of the environment, these useless constructions, put the usual hierarchies into question and divert the traditional values of art, and in a broader sense, of life. The use of poor materials, exempt of any economic value, reveals the humanist dimension of these pieces, which touch on reality but in an unreal manner. Pauline Bastard´s most recent projects make use of the iconography of the digital world to which we are exposed every day, but not always consciously. In manipulating various applications, the artist uses digital tools to compose veritable computerized skits. In her videos rethinks notions of landscape and of the image in general, often replaced by diagrams that dissimulate their true nature. Her work questions the concept of the traditional painting ... and by introducing notions of time and intimate memories
Sari Stenczer

Ivan Argote was born in 1983 in Bogota. He received his diploma from the Paris Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts and has continued to live and work in Paris. He has been an artist-in-residence at Mains d´euvres since June 2009 and has recently participated in a collective exhibition at the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in Miami.

A little humility and lots of humor characterize Ivan Argote´s art. This young Columbian, established in France for the past three years, was originally trained as a graphic designer but has expanded into absurdist performance, using the city as his theater of operations. His crowning achievement to date is tagging (the glass that covers) the Pompidou Center´s two Mondrian paintings. This lighthearted public-area parasite and backstreet vandal, who studied under Claude Closky and Guillaume Paris at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts, has attempted to distribute yellow coins in the metro (nobody wanted one) and to transform a simple commute into a ?making of" (during which, irresistibly, he directs the crowd like a consenting actor, from Action ! to the final Cut !). He has also produced a series of photographs in which he mimics the expressions of models in posters reigning over the streets. In short, he takes advantage of even the smallest faults riddling our quotidian in an attempt to make some sense of it, no matter how microscopic. In his digital work as well, he gently derails our systems and routines. He has proven skilled at creating absurd computer programs : one tells the time in money (it is now ten euros and twenty five cents) ; one transforms the performance of best-selling artists into bubble graphs according to their year´s earnings. Whether he pirates tourist blogs, dons false glasses and plays in photo machines, sets up a human-trap in a vacant lot in Berlin, or sets a globe spining along with the chickens in a rotisserie in Bogota, the attention he draws to the thread of stupidity running through our reality recalls the Actions-peu of Boris Achour´s early work, or the urban interventions of Didier Courbot. Argote´s touch, however, is lighter, with more of the quotidian surrealism at which Latin Americans excel.
Emmanuelle Lequeux

PAULINE BASTARD (FR), IVANE ARGOTE (CO)
THE RISING ACTION
9.4.- 25.5.2010, (vernisáž 8.dubna, 18:00), Vernon Projekt, Heřmanova 12, Praha 7


KONTAKT

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