Curated by Leila Khastoo with

Chris Burden, Harun Farocki, David Gilbert, Gareth James, Vishal Jugdeo
Peter Kirby, Oliver Laric, Simon Leung, Jan Mancuska, Job Piston, Miljohn Ruperto,
Amie Siegel, Jill Spector, Diego Tonus, Kerry Tribe, Francesco Vezzoli, David Wojnarowicz

Exhibition view,  Out-Of-___(Paris), photo © Chiwook Nho.

Exhibition view Out-Of-___(Paris), photo © Aurélien Mole.

David Gilbert, The Flea Circus, 2011, Photograph, Archival pigment print, 146 x 176,5 cm, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Amie Siegel, Black Moon/Hole Punches, 2010, Cibachrome print, Photograph, 49.5 x 76.2 cm, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Amie Siegel, Black Moon/Hole Punches, 2010, Cibachrome print, Photograph, 49.5 x 76.2 cm, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Harun Farocki, Ein Tag im Leben der Endverbraucher (A Day in the life of a Consumer), 1993, Video colour and sound. In German with English subtitles, 44’33’’, photo © Aurélien Mole.

An exhibition of Marie-Jeanne HOFFNER
12th May – 13th July 2012

Double Game

Basing itself on actual spaces and territories and borrowing their systems of standardized representation such as maps, patterns and cartography, the often site-specific work of Marie-Jeanne Hoffner – including drawings, installations, videos, photographs, models, etc. – broadens these perspectives while maintaining subtle tensions between construction and deconstruction, folding and unfolding, surface and volume, fullness and emptiness.

We encounter photograms in which the overlapping of strips of graph paper evokes a chaotic urbanism and, through a negative saturation, creates disturbing zones of white light that capture our attention. We come across small pieces of balsa wood frontally presented on a wooden support that make up the fragments of a latent assembled structure. Elsewhere, we see elements like strips of wood drawn in marker that compose the frail skeletons of architectures yet to be. Or are they perhaps already reduced to a state of ruins? Meanwhile, the moving image of the video echoes the model, whose “modulations” allow us – through displacement, addition and subtraction – to view the setting from different angles.

Flirting with abstraction, constructivism or perhaps even a form of surrealism, the forms and games of (de)construction employed or suggested by Marie-Jeanne Hoffner project us into constructed – or yet to be constructed – spaces located in an in-between, an intermediate phase caught between assembling and disassembling. It’s this very interval, this other “game”, that gives these concrete spaces transcended by the artist their full scope all while renewing our perception of them. Within this sensitive and changing zone new configurations come about, unfurling and unfolding, to be read – and explored – between the lines.

Anne-Lou Vicente, april 2012
(translation : Alex Balgiu et Katie Dallinger)

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Screen tones #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, 2012, drawing and collage on paper, 35 x 50 cm,
exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Parpaings, 2012, inkjet print, edition of 3,
exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Copy cut #1, #2, #3, collages of black and white laser photocopy pieces, 30 x 40 cm
exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Plan-reliefs, 2011, balsa on plywood, 30 x 40 x 50 cm. Building grids, 2009, photogram on baryt paper, 24 x 32 cm,
exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Modelo, 2012, balsa and wood, 30 x 45 x 25 cm,
exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Red proun, 2012, 1”50′, edition of 3. Model maker, 2012, 1”30′, edition of 3,
exhibition view, déplis, trames et grilles, Dohyang Lee Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

The exhibition takes its name from a work by Aurélie Godard: Carlo Mollino in San Remo (le rêve de surplomber).  Here it’s a homage to the architect through the evocation of one of his unfinished projects, based in Italy and positioned to dominate the Mediterranean. Le rêve de surplomber exhibits a selection of imaginary architectural works using both the art of modelling and the synthesis of real life, photography and documentary sculpture, watercolours as a narrative medium, and mechanical ballet.[1]

For several years Aurélie Godard has produced models of modern buildings, from memory. These sculptures, a genuine syntheses of several buildings, are then placed on their transport crates, which act as plinths. This transformation highlights the movement of the work and the transitory character of its exhibition. Aurélie Godard has developed an architecture of memory that bears witness to the modern utopia. For le rêve de surplomber she presents a model, in which geometry is no longer affirmative, but eroded and worn-out[2], based on a blockhaus recorded by Paul Virilio.

We find reference to this solid and circular architecture again in the work of Eric Tabuchi. In 1990, at the Venice Biennial, Bernd and Hilla Becher, major photographers in the New Objectivity movement, were awarded the prize for sculpture. Eric Tabuchi revisits this historical fact through the Chateauparc series, which models a selection of the buildings documented. He directs his research towards a recovery of the history of these forms, in order to circumvent the codes and to elevate these everyday architectural works to the rank of monuments.

Pierre Leguillon always strives, in his arrangements, to make images circulate and converse, and to overturn the possible constraints which make them not always accessible to everyone.[3] With Silent Show (Cheval) he summons the fantasy architecture of Joseph Ferdinand Cheval, better known by the name Facteur Cheval. This self-taught artist dedicated his life to building a monumental sculpture, a visionary who proposed, through his naïve architecture, an ideal palace.

Kristina Solomoukha’s drawings are also built on the communication between images, and particularly on the relationship with language. She is interested in the precise moment when, before formulating and stating a sentence, an image or a feeling of the sentence forms and appears in our imaginations. Through a series of watercolours and a model of social housing, the size of a ceramic ornament, she presents projects for possible future three-dimensional constructions, dream sculptures filled with personal narration.

Chloé Dugit-Gros exhibits objects found in the architectural arena of work: the workshop. She uses these elements to build an abstract and coloured landscape in perpetual movement. This mechanical ballet of subtly measured contrasts makes the image oscillate between representation and abstraction.

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September 17 – October 29, 2011

Save the date / Shana Moulton – “ I Lost Something in the Hills “  
Performance Tuesday, October 18, 2011, 6 pm

In « How to build a world? »[1], Stuart Candy (a.k.a. the skeptical futuryst) considers all possible ways to construct a universe. Candy is a futurologist: his research is about the building of future worlds. As a starting point, he reminds us that novelists, architects, engineers, industrial designers, craftsmen, film writers, directors, advertisers, storytellers (historians, politicians, journalists, psychoanalysts…) are all world builders. Their inventions help us envision and move towards the future.

The exhibition Probable, preferable, plausible, possible revolves around the figure of the artist as a futurist and as a world builder. It includes different images of the future: talking electronic objects, singing refrigerators, aliens that listen to music, futuristic -but dated- amusement parks being reduced to simple geometric shapes, screen backgrounds, Tetris abstractions, and a series of pictures from the science fiction universe. The exhibit takes the form of a high-tech bric-à-brac which outlines, as Erik Davis has termed it [2], “a secret history of mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology, and especially with communication technology”[3].

In the introduction to his work Techgnosis, Davis points out that it is no longer industrial technologies that prevail (and with them, the myth of the machine), but rather information technology – what in France, the land of the Minitel, is known by the already quite obsolete acronym TIC (Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication). Davis’s fascinating hypothesis is that religious imagination, magical thinking and the most fervent millenarism have, from the start, pervaded the history of technology and science, which come with many ambitious promises such as “freedom, prosperity and the end of all diseases.”[4]

Today computer science, the Internet and telecommunication generate their share of unlikely stories, mythologies, pseudo-sciences or technological fantasies. They have reshaped our relationship to the everyday world as well. Phones, shoes and cars have become intelligent. We treat electronic objects like we do human beings. We think magnetic waves are an invisible threat and fear them[v]. Ubiquitous computing and pervasive networks are making our world more magical, but also more frightening. Technology is a fount of irrationality, supernatural, beliefs and mysticism, Davis tells us. Thus, Shana Moulton’s New Age therapies, Mark Leckey’s enchanted household appliances, Frank Eon’s electronically assisted visions of the Futuroscope, Anthea Hamilton’s eccentric sculptures -the images of which mostly come from digital databases, and the objects from Ebay (this gigantic electronic flea market!), the appropriations Mathis Gasser draws from Swiss science-fiction or abstraction, or Sophia Ajdir’s Faraday cage… all of these works create new images of a world organized in all irrationality by information technology. For that matter, painting has a specific role to play in this story, as a pre-technological art being redefined today by digital pictures and computing practices.

Candy rightly notes that real life is often a mixture of utopias and dystopias, two representations that have nurtured the whole history of science fiction. But we are not interested in this now classical opposition: each image exists, as he further says, under different modalities of the probable, possible, preferable or plausible. Art has long tried to be forwards, at the most cutting edge of history. It could be that, being so avant-garde, art is now working at imagining the future (that is to say, at putting it in images); and that the blue- and greenscreens, the computered chroma key backgrounds, have become, after the blank page, the metaphor our times demand, the ultimate place where the new may appear.

-

Topology of  Memory (On the work of Aurélie Godard)
Wooden surfaces assembled in a certain order

A life-buoy is the consequence of the path of a disc travelling the 360° of a circle. The mazzocchio is a Florentine headdress that can be described as the geometrization of a life-buoy. The original circle can be more or less wide, but its occurrences in the form of bicoloured headwear, based on a chequered motif, notably in Paolo Uccello’s cycles Déluge et le retrait des eaux and La Bataille de San Romano, established the diameter of a head as a standard size. In one of the frescos in the cloister of Santa-Maria-Novella – which at once represents two episodes of the book of Genesis – Paolo Uccello  makes one of the characters (the one that is holding a cudgel) wear the mazzocchio around his neck. For Aurélie Godard, the problem is this: how, with the help of assembled wooden planes, can one arrive at something like a life-buoy, also coming close to something that could effectively make a hat, before throwing this round-but-angular figure into the water off the island of Ushant, so that it floats – perhaps all the way to Bas Jan Ader, who vanished in 1975 between Cape Cod and Ireland during an Atlantic crossing entitled In Search of the Miraculous II[1]. This is the most likely interpretation of Mercredi, viendras-tu manger, Jean sur une nappe propre? Before giving a more precise explanation (and the answer) to this enigmatic and coded question, let’s begin with this one, which will get us going, and which haunted Paolo Uccello: How many sides does a circle have? A question that gives rise to many responses. That the mazzocchio – or “torus” in mathematical language – was the symbol of work on the development of perspective during the Renaissance is important here, but not sufficient. Indeed, from every point of view, to draw this object (and to conceive it), is already an extremely complicated geometrical exercise. As we know, Giorgio Vasari strongly criticised Uccello for wasting his time developing such prowess[2]. What is perhaps less well known is the importance of marquetry in 15^th century Florence. The workshops competed with each other, adjusting thousands of little pieces of wood, like puzzles, to compose the panels, modelled as if they were windows opening out onto accumulations of various objects, represented in perspective with the greatest care. The impeccable cuttings, the expert angles and the use of  differently tinted woods allowed the artists to obtain the nuances and shadows necessary for a realistic rendering of light. There are (and this strongly resembles the “equipment” with which Aurélie Godard surrounds herself in her workshop) books, planes, measuring instruments, cuttings, polyhedra – hollowed out or full – and of course, the mazzocchio, or torus.

Space, planets, ellipses and attractive forces.

In the beginning, there will be a geometric form, like a square, “turning” about itself (as around a block of houses), in which the sides, according to a principle of cellular division, are divided in two, five times. The volumes Aurélie Godard obtains in this way, of which the first, the simplest, evokes the elementary structures of Sol LeWitt, but which, in suspension, in strange postures, as if submitted to disturbed gravity, the pitching of a ship, offer a short history of perspective, which is as the same time a short history of perception, in its constructive avatars, as has been envisaged since the 15^th century. Here the mathematical exercise is the pretext for a visual exercise –  but a “squared” visual exercise on the circle and its powers, as they are manifested in the universe. Indeed, rotundity and, more exactly, gravitation, have interested Aurélie Godard for a long time. Yet her interest is not in the grandiloquent representation of the cosmos, nor the perfection of the sphere, but rather that which comes through warping trajectories, damaging surfaces, tipping the mathematical model towards experience and chance. It’s about giving thought to the structure of the world, the forces contained in the work, rather than creating an image. Coriolis (cast aluminium, 2007), the small spherical sculpture, evokes the imaginary force which only exists for an observer who is also in motion. Observe the path of a marble on a vinyl record rotating on a turntable: seen from above, the marble seems to describe a straight line, from the centre to the edge. However, on the rotating disc itself, the marble will describe the arc of a circle. Mission to Mars (mural, acrylics,  500 x 300, 2006), The Bright Side of the Moon (plaster, 140cm diameter, 2006) and Les Formes vagues (mural, acrylics, 30cm diameter, 2008), also convoke the solar system, in a figurative fashion, which is not only a hard fact of space and planets, but also of ellipses and forces of attraction. However, it is the materials which give it meaning: Les Formes vagues – emerging from a circle of white paint, applied to a wall then scratched, revealing, the black primer beneath as marine waves, schematised in the style of Hokusai. In the same way, The Bright Side of the Moon, shows the irregularities of the lunar surface, realised through optical trickery by digging into the wall itself. Mission to Mars depicts a radio wave, rendered in paint, unless it is a bad quality radar capture, which appear as large squares of indecipherable colours. Starfinders, footballs found in the street, presented in the gallery’s basement, carries forward this meeting between spheres and time. Worn down by constant rotation, and the deformations that result, it bears witness to an attentive observation of the transformation of things, even under a barrage of kicks. The suspension device gives its name to the model reworked here, the world map. The balls create a new terrestrial geography, as a result of multiple accidents – bounces, punctures, and stains. If it has been known since Antiquity that the earth is round (thanks to lunar eclipses), it was Nicolaus Copernicus who brought about an end to the previous representation of the universe, substituting it with the heliocentric view, in which we find the principle of the torus once again: not only does the earth itself turn, but it also turns about the sun. On the scale of the universe, the torus is therefore an absolutely adequate tool of representation, the torus that was decomposed at the beginning.

Maps that indicate nothing

In a work from 2006, News from Home (postcards, 15 x 10 x 5 cm), a pile of pierced postcards, showing the Statue of Liberty, which appears in shadow against a red-orange twilight background, Aurélie Godard presents a traditional record of a voyage, signed with a certain emptiness. After all, absence is a Coriolis force like any other, exerted indirectly. The title, borrowed from Chatal Akerman, names America, and particularly New York, as a point of escape, or rather, we see, as a mirror. Another series of “holed” postcards, is given a more explicit title: En topologie la distance n’existe pas (In topology, distance doesn’t exist) (postcards, 2006). The title should be heard as a contradiction to the formula “out of sight, out of mind”, as much as a eulogy for cartography. Take note of the fascination it exerts on Aurélie Godard, as in Un faible degree de dess(e)in (felt, variable dimensions, 2009) or, from a topographical point of view, in Landscape (plaster, variable dimensions, 2005). These maps “which indicate nothing”[3] recognise the reality of chance more than the permanence of borders: the archipelago of Un faible degree de dess(e)in was made from paint stains picked up in various workshops and duly recorded according to their outlines. This cartographical activity draws as much from the great maritime explorers as from the research of architect Buckminster Fuller. Its representations of the world; drawn from the Dymaxion projection, presents the earth in the shape of a polyhedron constituted from six squares and eight rectangles, which transforms the five continents into a large central island, liberated from the traditional north/south, east/west schema[4]. The most celebrated of Fuller’s constructions – the geodesic domes – came as a response to the question: how many faces does a sphere have? A question which has much to do with our initial interrogation. It’s on a small boat off the coast of Ushant that we discover Jean (a pseudonym between John and Jan), who has the false air of Leonardo’s old men, the mazzocchio on their heads, coming and going offshore. In this video (Dr Livingstone, I presume) filmed in April 2011, Jean makes us think of Claude Monet in his workshop-boat, studying the reflections on the water. Offshore, over the horizon is, of course, Manhattan, from where the long letters of the heroine of News From Home came.

Architecture of memory

At first, America – in the naïve accepted term, if one may say so – provides the iconographical elements in Aurélie Godard’s work: the Statue of Liberty, as we saw, but also the punch-ball, the cactus, the Hockney-esque divers, surfboards, Chevrolets, Cadillacs, Buicks and others, become the subject of varying subversions[5]. The punch-ball is red, but wooden; the surfboards, for their part, show off the traces of a shark attack, Jaws style; the “portraits” of cars entitled News From Home (2), bear witness to the presence of paint and colour, not in the manner of representation, but in that of memory. The photographic documents, obtained thanks to a digital zoom, are more than just meaningless chromatic scales, a memory of we don’t really know what, of the moment the cars were photographed, unless it’s a memory of the preceding instant, which gives rise to a little square of colour that has been painted. For some years, Aurélie Godard has been producing exercises in the construction, from memory, of models of modern buildings (Dear Charlie, wood, resin, paint, 2010), including those of Oscar Niemeyer (Painting with Oscar, pour AVJ, wood, paint, 2010) These are presented on large crates, as if they’ve just come out of a ship’s hold. The incessant ocean crossings, which are present in this work, in these massive boxes, from which memories of modern utopia are extracted, are the most consequential witnesses. Aurélie Godard does not cite modernity, she remembers it, and, what is more, thwarts the pretentions of the Old World to impose its views on the New. She acts as if modernity came from elsewhere and in re-examining the propositions, is even critical of it, as in L’Heure de l’étale (wood, acrylic, coating, 2007), a white wave with solid foam that uncovers coloured architectural fragments. This broken modernism does not lead to cynicism. From fragments, it is always possible to make something (“I’m a painter, I nail my pictures,” as Kurt Schwitters said.) La Chaise de Lucrèce (qu’il est doux, quand sur la vaste mer les vents soulèvent les flots, d’apercevoir du rivage les périls d’autrui) (driftwood, 80cm diameter, 2010), created from pieces of wood from various shipwrecks in Brittany, shows this. The seat, in which, from the armrests to the back, everything is round, has something of the astrolabe about it: it seems to be able to pivot on several axes and to turn around on itself according to a centre of gravity that is difficult to place. Perhaps one has to simply sit and meditate on the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, (Pluto), these planets[6] which are evoked at first and which give the key to the enigmatic invitation: Jean, will you come and eat, Wednesday, on a clean tablecloth?

Emmanuel Van der Meulen, 2011.

02.04 – 14.05

Vanishing Point, Vantage Point brings together Elena Damiani and Magali Lefebvre around considerations of points-of-view and vanishing points, both necessary for the creation of a view in perspective. The two artists enter into a dialogue with architecture and question the manner of representation obtained through the conical projection of an object, which results in an analysis of the image that approaches our visual perception.

In the work of Elena Damiani, architecture is a technique for representing different conceptions of landscape. The Palimpsests 1 & 2 series – in which the definition itself integrates the idea of reincorporation into the same medium – delivers an overview of narratives by completely abstracting them from their spatial and temporal indices. The urban landscape oscillates between representation of the ephemeral and the inescapable traces of the past. This architecture, where ruin predominates, plays on an ambiguity of scale and on a strong connotative dimension, to offer a construction that is as retrospective as it is forward-looking. It’s in these disturbed and desolated territories, where each element loses its geographical location, that Elena Damiani records a personal archive of a manufactured time. To create her collages she has, over the years, collected old architecture manuals. In Untitled (Ronchamp), we find this ancestry with a reference to Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut de Ronchamp Chapel, finished in 1955. The original plans show an entirely curved construction, the harmonious forms employed by the architect making direct reference to the surrounding hills. In Untitled (Ronchamp), which uses some of the openings on the external façade, Elena Damiani pays tribute to this collusion between natural and artificial constructions.

Before turning to installation and sculpture, Magali Lefebvre practiced photography. It’s natural, therefore, that her work integrates the notion of perspective. For the exhibition Vanishing Point, Vantage Point, the artist brings together all of her pieces from the Playtime Without a Perspectograph project produced during her residency at Wiels in Brussels, in 2010. It is a project built around seven pieces, developing the progress from plan to form, from image to volume. This body of work contains willfully abstract constructions, joined to the ground by thin wooden poles. The motifs of anthropomorphic appearance thus seem suspended, and real landmarks are intentionally blurred by the flattening of lines and the configuration of points. These minimalist modules of inspiration create an anonymous architecture, a modeling of the real. Through the apparition of these forms, Magali Lefebvre invites us to produce movement in a static image, to experience a new cognitive dimension.

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exhibition view, vanishing point / vantage point, galerie dohyang lee, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Magali Lefebvre, Playtime without a perspectograph, wood, paper, seven silkscreen, 64 x 90 cm, edition of 5, photo © Aurélien Mole.

exhibition view, vanishing point / vantage point, galerie dohyang lee, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Magali Lefebvre, Playtime without a perspectograph, black and white photography, wood, painting, 27 x 36 cm, unique piece, photo © Aurélien Mole.

exhibition view, vanishing point / vantage point, galerie dohyang lee, photo © Aurélien Mole.

exhibition view, vanishing point / vantage point, galerie dohyang lee, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Elena Damiani, from the series Palimpsest II, 5 collages, 2010, Pillars under no shed, on an entropic site, The Hexahedron Sentinel, Study for a Symmetrical Dichotomy, Trenches, on a parched site, The Past is a Foreign Country II, unique, 37 x 54 cm framed, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Elena Damiani, from the series Palimpsest I, The changing image of the city, Road to mount V, 2010, 40 x 30 cm unframed, unique, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Elena Damiani, from the series Palimpsest I, Dislocations Tav. XIII, Remnants TAV. V, 2010, 40 x 30 cm unframed, unique, photo © Aurélien Mole.

exhibition view, vanishing point / vantage point, galerie dohyang lee, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Magali Lefebvre, Playtime without a perspectograph, 2010, wood, plaster, unique piece in two parts, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Magali Lefebvre, Playtime without a perspectograph, 2010, wood, cardboard, 202 x 85 x 5 cm, unique piece, photo © Aurélien Mole.

BERLIN – PARIS 2011

PSM Gallery @ Dohyang Lee
Life in a house with wooden billows

Øystein Aasan
Thomas Chapman
Mathis Collins
Sophie Erlund

29 Janvier – 12 Février 2011

‘The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire setting. There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands – and that was all.’

(Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment)

Physical and mental states act jointly through the human body. The physical body acts as a house to the human spirit and to the mind. The other way around reflects the architecture of the person who inhabits it. In the exhibition ‘Life in a house with wooden billows’, Øystein Aasan (NO), Thomas Chapman (US), Mathis Collins (F) and Sophie Erlund (SE) explore the interrelation of body, mind and architecture in different ways.

Øystein Aasan, born 1977 in Norway, manipulated glass negatives from the 1920s and 30s. The slides originated as educational material for the students of the University in Oslo; from which the students could learn about architectural history. Aasan worked the slides back into an archival method of storage, into a sort of filing box, which stand up like skyscrapers onto wooden plinths.

Thomas Chapman, born 1975 in California, created the 2010 installation ‘The Warm Whole Chapel’. The installation’s original purpose was to provide shelter to the artist, who worked in a studio without heating. Slowly the structure transformed into an architectural piece, a colorful chapel, in which Chapman archived and transformed source materials, sketches, and plans into building components.

Mathis Collins, born 1986 in Paris, carves wooden heads which he affixes to cork stoppers. Inherited from an Italo-Germanic tradition dating from the early 20th Century, the production of these objects ceased in the 1960′s. In 2010, when Cyril Verde invited Collins to dig an artesian well in the Palais de Tokyo, they had a wooden portrait of themselves made and affixed to a cork. This was the model for a future fountain. Following the exhibition of this piece, Collins started to produce these objects himself. The double-portrait of Damien and Victor is the first work in this series.

Sophie Erlund, born 1978 in Denmark, works from found materials, which return her mind to a mental stage she works about. Erlund researches the liminal phase in her work. Liminality is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes. This phase encompasses a mental stage between anticipation and fear, which Erlund expresses in her work through the use of architectural models.

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Sophie Erlund
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery,
photo © Aurélien Mole.

Sophie Erlund
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery,
photo © Aurélien Mole.

Sophie Erlund
Hollow air mirror, 2010, nails, fur, bast, 86 x 65 x 5 cm.
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Mathis Collins
Corkstopper (portrait of Damien and Victor), 2011, cork, wood, watercolor, copper, 23 cm diamter, 14 cm deep.
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

Øystein Aasan
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery,
photo © Aurélien Mole.

Øystein Aasan
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery,
photo © Aurélien Mole.

Thomas Chapman and Nik Nowak
The warm Whole Chapel, 2009-2010, mixed media.
Exhibition view : Life in a house with wooden billows, Psm Gallery at Dohyang Lee, Courtesy PSM Gallery, photo © Aurélien Mole.

BERLIN – PARIS 2011

Dohyang Lee @ Psm Gallery
This must be the place

Chloé Dugit-Gros
Laetitia Badaut Haussmann
Marie-Jeanne Hoffner
Fleur Noguera

15 January – 29 January 2011

As part of the 2011 edition of the exchange project between galleries in Berlin and Paris, the galerie Dohyang Lee is delighted to present the exhibition This Must Be the Place, bringing together Chloé Dugit-Gros, Laetitia Badaut Haussmann, Marie-Jeanne Hoffner and Fleur Noguera, at the PSM Gallery. With no restrictions of media, This Must Be the Place, expresses the distinct territory developed by each of these artists.

The video Colors is a re-envisioning of one of Walt Disney’s first feature length animations: Cinderella. Preserving just the chromatic palette and the duration of each original scene, an impression of activity and movement persists nevertheless. Laetitia Badaut Haussmann erases any sense of narrative, keeping, as an indicator only the duration of the film. Over 72 minutes, Colors is a sweeping procession of monochrome images in movement.

Bringing together all of the primary colors, Carbones comprises a selection of paper normally used for the reproduction of patterns. Through a crafty reversal, the object of reproduction becomes itself the subject of this same reproduction. Marie-Jeanne Hoffner renders the marks of her manipulation visible, detailing through photography a multitude of unfolded spaces.

Leaving behind bi-dimensionality, with Sans-Titre (Untitled) Chloé Dugit-Gros alludes to Malevitch’s Black Cross. This motif, inherited from the avant-garde, appears here in sculptural form, resembling a chest with handles. Associated with Peinture Vaudou ((Voodoo Painting), Matières Premières (Raw Materials) and Prestidugitation, a formal narrative vocabulary emerges, ceaselessly playing with the back-and-forth between plane and volume.

Devonian Levels makes reference to the filming location frequented by Fleur Noguera and to the Devonian geological system, linked to the prehistoric period during which South America witnessed a huge development of its flora and fauna. In the style of an explorer, Fleur Noguera offers a cinematographic exercise made up of a succession of scenes – low-angle, close-up and panoramic – evoking a new geography. The film, resembling an archive, offers a montage without effects, a transition through color and light, a genuinely reinvented logic, oscillating between natural science and a geology field trip project.

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Exhibition view : This Must Be the Place at PSM Gallery, Berlin, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Chloé Dugit-Gros, Untitled (Black Cross Malevitch. 1915), 2008, wood, handles, acrylic paint, 190 x 190 x 25 cm, unique, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Carbones (Carbons), 2009, 5 framed impressions on Hahnemuhle paper, 50 x 40 cm, edition of 5, Courtesy the artist and Dohyang Lee gallery

Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Carbones (Carbons), 2009, 5 framed impressions on Hahnemuhle paper, 50 x 40 cm, edition of 5, Courtesy the artist and Dohyang Lee gallery

Exhibition view : This Must Be the Place at PSM Gallery, Berlin, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Exhibition view : This Must Be the Place at PSM Gallery, Berlin, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Chloé Dugit-Gros, Raw Materials, 2008, wood, silver painting 210 x 150 x 20 cm, unique work, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Chloé Dugit-Gros, Voodoo Painting, 2008, cleats and rubber, 200 x 200 cm, unique work, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Map of Australia, 2009, Inkjet Print on Fine Art Paper, 35 x 24 in, Courtesy the artist and Dohyang Lee gallery

Fleur Noguera, Devonian Levels, 2010, videostill, color, silent, 6 minutes, edition of 5, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Fleur Noguera, Devonian Levels, 2010, videostill, color, silent, 6 minutes, edition of 5, Courtesy Dohyang Lee gallery

Laetitia Badaut Haussmann

13 November – 23 December 2010

“Everything must be considered as though it were spoken by a character in a novel.” Roland Barthes (Roland Barthes par lui-même)

In 1944, the Argentine lady of letters and patron Edelmira Thompson de Mendiluce published a text which, for many, prefigured the New Novel: Poe’s Room, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Philosophy of Furniture. In this short essay, Poe describes the ideal decoration for a room, ardently defending the pure English style in contrast to the ostentatious tastes of the American bourgeoisie. It is unknown whether the writer is evoking a real room, or if it is a pure product of his imagination. Edelmira commissioned a canvas from a painter, her friend Atilio Franchetti, based on the instructions given in Poe’s text. Then, through fantasy or folly, decided to have the same room built in the gardens of her hacienda in Azul. No trace remains of this construction apart from the rather precise description given by Roberto Bolaño in his chapter about the Mendiluce family in his Nazi Literature in the Americas.

Without any material trace, today these bedrooms have become mythical. One might legitimately question the reality of their existence. Physical objects or products of the imagination, they are known today only by the texts that describe them. They exist, therefore, only in the readers’ imaginations. Thus, Poe’s Room becomes a moving zone whose territory is the reader. At the crossroads of these two texts, Laetitia Badaut Haussmann attempts to retranscribe this floating space. She gives form to this “non-place,” this utopia, a term that needs to be understood according to its dual etymology – a place which is not (the existence of the room being called into question) and a place of happiness (it’s where Edelmira would have spent the last moments of her life, in all likelihood her most peaceful).

Making pianos sound that are no longer there, playing with the colors of a work, preserving an object beyond all reach, by its museumification… The work of Laetitia Badaut Haussmann is often initiated under these pretexts. In every sense of the term: the pretext being at once a motif of dissimulation, that which is there before the text (a pre-text), or even, why not, the pretext, the purple-bordered toga worn by young Roman nobles. Purple, just as found in the rooms of Edelmira and Poe. It is not by chance. It’s a leap, no doubt, but the pretext is also there for that, it hides the motive for an action as much as it reveals it. For Laetitia Badaut Haussmann it becomes a field of study that gives rise to a real situation and to its transcription (pictorial, cinematographic, sculptural, sonorous…).

Thus the quotation from Jean-Luc Godard with which the film Tiebreaker begins, is also a means to transform a text into a context. Made literal, this is applied to the letter, without fear of impoverishment. The artist seizes it to define the blurring zones to be surveyed, transitional spaces between an abstract idea and its rendering. Neither a trace, nor a pure materialization, the work drifts forward, a space at once below and beyond the original, a geography in movement towards probable evolution. Opposed to all spectacularization, the pretext completely dissolves in its new form and only reappears intermittently, depending on the knowledge of the viewer alongside the desire of the artist to render it visible. The nascent form never totally recovers. The separation produced works as an escape route, making a subterfuge of the object, a “non-proof”. The non-place therefore becomes a communal place, less a monument for the original than a celebration of its absence.

In the work of Laetitia Badaut Haussmann, it is as much a question of seeing as being with, the objects acting as a way in. From any point of view, the work is a medium. The artist creates intermediary zones, intervals like so many bridges in a fragmented chronology, spaces to which it is impossible to deny physical existence, but which are nevertheless pure imagination. Genuine views into the mind, and a homage which Elmira would, I’m sure, have appreciated for its real value.

Edelmiro Carrozzone, Buenos Aires, 1st November 2010

(Translated from the Spanish into French by Mickaël Pierson, and into English by Adam Biles)

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Window Color, 2010′ installation, inkjet prints on sticky paper variable dimensions, unique piece
An Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts production, Paris Cergy

Could you be mine, 2010, sculpture, resin, bronze powder, gold powder 150 x 50 x 70 cm, unique piece
Fairy shelves, 2010, installation wood, gold leaf variable dimensions, unique piece
Curve serie # 1, 2010, installation, aluminium plaque, 100 x 200 cm, unique piece

Could you be mine, 2010, sculpture, resin, bronze powder, gold powder 150 x 50 x 70 cm, unique piece
Fairy shelves, 2010, installation, wood, gold leaf, variable dimensions, unique piece
Curve serie # 1, 2010, installation, aluminium plaque, 100 x 200 cm, unique piece

Fairy shelves, 2010, installation, wood, gold leaf, variable dimensions, unique piece

Curve serie # 1, 2010, installation, aluminium plaque, 100 x 200 cm, unique piece

Could you be mine, 2010, sculpture, resin, bronze powder, gold powder 150 x 50 x 70 cm, unique piece

Tiebreaker, 2010, video, 5’10’’, black and white, sound PAL – 4/3′, Edition of 5