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Lou Masduraud - Get Out of Here

ADA Rome

February 23 - April 27 2024

I’ve modeled sculptures that take the form of holes. There are 6+1 bronze holes that I named "Regard", a French term meaning "look", but that is also the name given to a hole in the sidewalk to peer under the asphalt, observing ducts and pipes. Usually, it is a cast iron plate, but in this case are vertical rings of modest size, made of polished bronze, but, above all, they are holes.

Sculpting a hole is complex because it’s about creating a void instead of shaping matter.

And through this void, a passage opens.

I must therefore outline the contours of the hole: a context to cross, to overcome, to pierce.

The frame of a very, very heavy door. The possibility of a mental break-in. 

An escape, an escape plan, a new run to get out of here.

Over the past few years, I have carved several

mouths, ears, ventilation grates, secret passages. 

Every time I sculpt, I leave holes. 

A hole in a face, a tooth, a fountain, a house, a wall, a fence.

They act as valves between an invisible and underground world 

and a luxuriant and generous exterior. An irresistible kiss with freedom. 

A sort of overturn, of possible revolutions.

Would you like to take a look inside? Slide over the threshold of reality to play with the abyss? Start a revolt? Savor the crystal clear water? Come face to face with your alter ego 

or look at you from the outside?

I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT SEX. WELL, A LITTLE, FOR SURE. 

But not only that: it’s not a sexual hole, on the contrary, there is no sexual hole - it’s rather a portal for merging into another world and abandoning yourself to it.

Always building yourself up against the other, sure. Spy through the lock, all right. And sometimes, wide open, let the air in.

Are you wondering what it would be like if everything collapsed? If you opened the door wide?

A huge vacuum of air currents and the world upside down, sweating.

On the other side, a head could sprout, even a whole body.

I vividly imagine such a scene in a movie.

Turning reality on itself like you would a sock.

Everything trembles, a glass breaks, and then everything is messed up, aspirated.

A great visual vortex of shapes, matter, memories of a lifetime through that tiny hole, and BAM, everything is back in place, it’s similar but different.

These are the kinds of holes I carve.

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Ghosts & Bones 

Gizela Mickiewicz, Berenice Olmedo, Tenant of Culture

27 March - 30 April 2021

Stereo ul. Bracka 20b 00-028 Warszawa www.galeriastereo.pl/exhibitions/ghosts-bones/

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TOBIAS SPICHTIG 

DIE MATRATZEN / THE MATTRESSES

12/02/2016-02/04/2016

Jan Kaps, Cologne

http://www.jan-kaps.com/home/

It is said that individuals act according to their background. Action is thus placed within a particular frame, colour or landscape. In much the same way, Tobias Spichtig describes and mounts the various components of his exhibitions as backgrounds. Backgrounds that are not intended to defne the space, but rather provide a kind of framework for action for an individual, who is not described in detail...

These elements in the exhibition in the gallery Jan Kaps in Cologne are represented by the eponymous mattresses – including further “paintings”, which take the form of bed linens provided friends – and humanoid sculptures, with cloths stiffened with a material used in aircraft construction, whereby the clothes are also provided by friends. These two work groups were created successively in the past year. Both are obviously images of the presence of those not present. As non-present individuals, the slightly oversized clothing sculptures are also taken out of focus and placed in the background. The mattresses are, by their very nature, also not the focus of attention, since they are covered by bed linens. Psychological effects, which could theoretically come into the fore, develop quite differently, depending upon the viewer’s emotional state; in any event, these effects distinguish us from the artist, who envisions friends, whereas we see only a certain ghostlike absence. His image, which is laden with affection and friendship – the friend on the bed, a generally rather peaceful place – is transformed in the eyes of the viewer into a stranger, to whom one has come too close and is comparable to the unpleasant, prefer- ably expelled thoughts of presences stored in the mattresses of hotel beds. The construction of intima- cy towards an object has always been one of the tasks of sculpture, and the slightly larger-than-life scale is a trick of classical sculpture, used to facilitate an intimate view even from a distance, which would otherwise only be possible from a much closer proximity. This principle borrowed from stone sculpture, which had to overturn material abstraction by means of many such tricks, is, however, merely secondary here. In this exhibition, the means of creating a sense of intimacy towards an object are actually quite simple. What remains, so to speak, is the resulting intimacy within an atmosphere of slight eeriness, which depicts the actual story that takes place within exhibition against the background of Tobias Spichtig’s works.

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Festive Kunst 2015 And the award for most festive gallery Christmas card goes to... Christian Anderson, Copenhagen

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FANTODS

Anna-Sophie Berger, Lucia Elena Prusa

Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna

July 27 – August 10, 2015

Press Release: An irritated state. She talks faster and moves her hands around more often than normal. Crash! Anna heard the din from across the hall. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing. …fantastical being of a menacing nature, more akin to say, a fantom. Your skin is so tight you can’t shut your eyes without opening your mouth. RA INCENSE 2 parts sunflower petals 3 parts gum Arabic 3 parts gum acacia 10 ml jasmine oil per 8 oz. dry herbs 10 ml bergamot oil per 8 oz. dry herb OUR BODY ROUTINE Two styles in which silence is advocated: loud and soft. Another term for it could be ‘silent knowledge’. Bathing, showering Toileting and toilet hygiene Dressing Swallowing/eating Feeding Functional mobility/transfers Personal device care Personal hygiene and grooming Sexual activity I fantasize about having scarlet fever, because a diagnose always soothes me. I wonder if I am keeping the virus because it attaches me to home? To refresh an aching head: Flour, 1; incense, 1; wood of wa, 1; waneb plant, 1; mint, 1; horn of a stag, 1; sycamore seeds, 1; mason‘s plaster, 1; seeds of zart, 1; water, 1; mash, apply to the head. Freshly produced ambergris has a marine, faecal odour. However, as it ages, it acquires a sweet, earthy scent. Then Lucia is drifting away from knowledge. It is characteristic of all kinds of handicraft that we learn to master them through someone showing us what to do and then imitating them. This applies to all skills that are not mediated through language, from riding a bicycle to cooking. Then, as we gradually gain in skill, we learn a set of rules that is applicable to that specific handicraft. This set of rules is a concentrate of experiences accumulated over a long period of time. Once it has been mastered, the individual is able to gain the freedom to deviate from it in a particular direction. (Gertrud Sandqvist, On Intuition) Common Juniper tree (Juniperis phonecia; Juniperus drupacea) digestive, soothes chest pains, soothes stomach cramps. Cubeb pepper (Piper cubeba; Piperaceae) urinary tract infections, larynx and throat infections, gum ulcers and infections, soothes headaches. Poppy (papaver somniferum) relieves insomnia, relieves headaches, anaesthetic, soothes respiratory problems, deadens pain. “I put my fist through the wall for no good reason, gotta be the fantods.”

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“Good luck with your natural, combined, attractive and truthful attempts in two exhibitions”

CRAC Alsace, Altkirch

Curated by: Filipa Oliveira and Elfi Turpin

June 18 – September 20, 2015

Greetings all, We would like to welcome you to the exhibition Good luck with your natural, combined, attractive and truthful attempts in two exhibitions. This project brings together artists whose practice is founded on cooperation and interchange with a diversity of social, geographic and economic spheres; and who are attempting, at the level of an art centre, to look into the modalities, circumstances and other aspects of making art. If the title of the exhibition reflects the work of Charles Fourier and certain facets of his theory of passionate attraction, it is because we have indulged in what he called «butterfly passion», freely borrowing from him terms that might be useful to us. For instance, in Fourier’s language the word truthful refers to the «truthful social commerce» of the members of his phalansteries, as opposed to the false commerce of the civilised world. Truthful commerce is founded on a cooperative system which does away with all speculative intermediaries between production and distribution of foodstuffs and manufactured goods. But this is not all, and it is not our subject. Here we construe the word «commerce» in its broad semantic sense: as a form of interchange involving the dissemination of proposals, knowledge and ideas in a way that sets up reciprocal communication and thus engenders human relationships full of the pleasure of communication with others. The works making up this exhibition have to do as much with a process of exchange, however odd it may be, as with the actual objects exchanged and their subsequently modified production tools. These works proceed from (and produce) situations of sociability based on the notions of sharing the artistic act with, or delegating it to, other artists, the members of a community or the public. Hence they will often entail a redistribution of roles – in particular that of the creator – and will overflow the spatio- temporal context of the exhibition by involving communal objects that evolve over time. So the exhibition starts at CRAC Alsace in Altkirch on 18 June at 7:30 pm and will surface again – in a new form, naturally – at the Fórum Eugénio de Almeida in Évora, Portugal in 2017. We look forward to seeing you for an exchange of ideas at the opening. In the meantime we wish you Good luck with your natural, combined, attractive and truthful attempts in two exhibitions. See you soon, Filipa Oliveira and Elfi Turpin

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Santo Tolone

Come Quando Fuori Piove 17 September — 31 October 2015

Frutta, Rome

Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Spades =

Cuori, Quadri, Fiori, Picche

Come Quando Fuori Piove =

As When Outside, Rain

“Anarchist Evening at the Magic Theatre. For Madmen Only. Price of Admission Your Mind”

This is a game that cannot be won.

The invitation to the Magic Theatre was received by Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf. Sounds a bit like a dorm room poster now, but the meaning carries. The theatre is only of the mind and only a crazy person would really want to know what’s going on in the darkest and deepest reaches of their psyche. The question here is how willing are you to see what’s on the other side of the curtain.

Here we have a theatre, a game, but first a waiting room. Purgatorial bureaucracy and unsure authority. Perhaps Kafka might be better to invoke here, but let’s stick with Hesse. Do you wait? Do you pass through? If you wait, get frustrated, and leave, this becomes about that. But if you push through, granting yourself the power to do so, when passing the barrier you realize the show has already begun.

Just beyond, a video of a mysterious curtain, slightly crumpled, shifts around something in the center, very slowly lifting the stratus of fabric.

Further on, this almost looks like an art gallery, excepting these curtains move back and forth. With each shift, an artwork is hidden and another is revealed. In the center, a sculpture made of pieces from semi-disposable Swedish furniture creaks and moves with each swish.

There a sky of bananas. There a chess player is lost in a mind game of shifting shapes. A simple cartoony joke on the left disappears into abstract lines. Here a false-ceiling is a false ceiling, fallen to a brightly colored shape on the wall like a forgotten Ellsworth Kelly and not a ceiling at all.

The game and theatre here are only in your mind. Can you decipher the abstraction of the chess-player even with a hint? Do you recognize the IKEA Lack coffee table’s parts in the sculpture in the center? Do you see that space has shifted in the false-ceiling tile or do you only see an abstract work of art? Can you tell that the sky is made of bananas, their shapely forms traced into clouds?

If you made it as far as passing the waiting room, we can assume you’ll figure your way through this.

We don’t think that you’ll lose your mind in this one. The author of this maze is gentle, funny, peculiar, and a little lascivious (what exactly is moving that curtain in the video?), but his intention is not to make you a lunatic. But you have to be a little crazy to even see these as games, to understand this as a performance starring you, to push past the waiting room and truly see what each work hides.

The game cannot be won, only revealed.

Collectively these ludic works create an atmosphere. Like the suits of playing cards transforming into a mnemonic device of weatherly declaration.

As when outside, rain.

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JOSÉ PEDRO CROFT

May 9 - July 11, 2015

Galerie Bernard Bouche, Paris

José Pedro Croft diverts daily objects from their original function. He intermingles the visual, plastic and poetic dimensions of the objects created, producing a feeling of precarious balance between stable and unstable which, according to the artist, « reflects the transitional nature of the world ». His sculptures create a complex dialogue with the environment, by means of simple, almost minimalist structures, which combine both the materiality of the object and its formal aspects. Sometimes, his sculptures are strengthened by the use of vivid colours, which are applied so to suggest a perception of the sculpture as a bas-relief. Furthermore, Croft uses mirrors and glass to play with light effects, shadow and reflections in order to create new volumes and an altered sense of space. In this way, through its oppositions, a dialectical tension between the void and the fullness appears.

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Yuki Okumuru - Measuring Roman Ondák

Misako & Rosen, Tokyo, 8 February - 8 March 2015

Roman Ondák plays a vital role in the creation of Measuring Roman Ondák (2015), by Japanese artist Yuki Okumura (b. 1978). During the exhibition, should he choose to accept an invitation to present himself, an attendant will mark Roman Ondák’s height, first name, and date of the measurement on the gallery wall. Beginning as an empty white space, from and for a certain time, the gallery may be marked with the trace of one specific person.

The inclusion of Roman Ondák in the process of Yuki Okumura’s art making, a surrogate sort of practice, has a long tradition in the history of performance-based art. By inviting another to actively participate in the creation of his/her art, the artist attempts to overcome traditional divisions between artist and other, production and reception.

Measuring Roman Ondák turns Roman Ondák’s original piece, Measuring the Universe, a work in which the domestic custom of recording children’s heights on door frames is turned into a public event, referring through its title to humankind’s age-old desire to gauge the scale of the world, into a consideration on the nature of author / viewership. The process creates a work of art with a single potential participant, merging art with everyday life in a confluence that is at the very center of Okumura’s artistic practice.

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Nicole Wermers - Infrastruktur

Herald St, London

February 28th - April 12th 2015

Nicole Wermers’ exhibition Infrastruktur (‘Infrastructure’) looks at the structures of ritualised social relations in general and at the material objects through which these relations are communicated in particular. Although the two bodies of work on view are formally and physically distinct – they do not form an installation as such – they are structurally not dissimilar in that they comprise legible objects that have been reassembled or made anew in a different material form, re-contextualising their location-specific orientations from where transient acts and exchanges have been made into fixed concrete form.

Untitled Chairs (2014-15), is a series of unique dining chair and fur coat assemblages where the individual garments are seamlessly and permanently sewn around a chair’s form creating an entirely new one... The coats hang as if their owners had left the room, a coded fleeting ritual marking their absence and their ‘ownership’ of the chair and its ‘place’ as one would do in a public space.

Wermers has taken the flyer as a template more or less to scale and remade them as a series of three dimensional, matt white clay reliefs entitled Sequence I-IV (2015). The paper tear-off flyer is a temporary exchange mechanism here re-embodied as wall-mounted ceramics, resembling a castellated parapet or a set of teeth in need of a dentist but with no written message and no phone numbers. It has become a hardened relic of a fugitive social relation once removed and congealed, a ‘blank’ structural code to be deciphered. Like the chairs, it too rehearses the movement from the artist’s initial observation of social phenomena through an active interface to the static sculpture, telegraphing the persistent ways in which infrastructure informs it.

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Festive Kunst 2014

Lucy Clout, 'Spleen', 2014

Sand-cast Bronze H8.2cm x W5.1cm x D2.4cm Edition of 10 (+1AP) £500.00

Limoncello's Christmas edition this year is Lucy Clout's small bronze piece, cast from a handmade lumpen spleen. The spleen in France symbolic of misery and in Britain, of spite: Merry Christmas one and all...

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Limoncello 340-344 Kingsland Road London E8 4DA limoncello@limoncellogallery.co.uk www.limoncellogallery.co.uk

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Jewyo Rhii, Wilkinson, London 7 Sep - 26 Oct 2014

"When I think of the works of Jewyo Rhii, I see sharply focused letters, intricately carved from wood, forming the word “fear”; words written high on the wall in thin pencil; a small wooden table made from pieces of wood ingeniously fitted together; an open door with no handle and another with a handle; the drawn contours of two bodies in which the lines have a very precise relationship with one another, but are also playful in a way that perhaps exists only in the drawing and in love. And then I see the long series of typewriters with iron bars weighted with stones that you kick to make the stamps on the other ends of the bars print words vertically on the wall: “no birds, no trees”. Sounds that die away in a written language. "

Irene Veenstra 

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Jason Dodge - We are the Meeting

Casey Kaplan, New York

January 9 – February 22, 2014

We are the meeting.

In the last exhibition at the gallery, you connected a copper pipe in the main space to the water supply for the gallery and ran it out into the center of the room. At the end of the pipe was something similar to a hose crank handle and a small paper tag attached to the pipe that read, “Build a great Aquarium”... Seeing aquariums in the space will be hard. Drawing a line around the electrical charge of the space gives visual and physical life to this energetic presence. Smoke from the chimney is absent, and the sky is turned on its side. Voices and sounds from Mongolia, Georgia, Israel and Brazil, will be trapped inside devices that send them across oceans, forests, deserts and skies, and the gallery itself will breathe light instead of water, from rose to white, white to rose.

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Chadwick Rantanen - Concerned, Interested and Wanting to Help

STANDARD (OSLO)

January 10 – February 9, 2014

“It can go ‘both ways’. More than one object creates a symmetrical system or self referential unit. Self satisfied / perverse preservation. (Judgemental: should I try to help this man?) I am not really involved in the producers trajectory, I am trying to halt it / atrophy it / recall it. Stop it before it is simply bought, discarded and made again. Make it so it’s now only to be looked at.” - Chadwick Rantanen

This inherent whimsical quality to industry and industrial standards is at the heart of the works of Chadwick Rantanen; a constant seeking out of the tension, balance and frequent imbalance between the readymade and the handmade. Or rather, the logic of industrial production is isolated and slightly perverted to lay the ground for a logic of sculpture production. A slender wedging of form and function with the help of the modified, the adapted, the personalized, the pimped, the DIY-ed, the Nike ID-ed, the made- to-measure, the bespoke. So what do you want to do for this exhibition? I want to adjust the lights.

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You are invited to 'A Mangy Gherkin on a Horse-dung Ground' – an exhibition by Kate Owens

  Limoncello

340-344 Kingsland Road London E8 4DA limoncello@limoncellogallery.co.uk www.limoncellogallery.co.uk

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Autocorrect July 25 - September 14, 2013

Josée Bienvenu Gallery, NY

Ana Bidart, Paper on Ink, 2013, inkwell, ink, wood, paper, light, dimensions variable

We used to be responsible for our own typographical mistakes. Now, in a general trend to outsource our mental function to a global prosthetic brain, advanced predictive text software has taken over. "geocentric” becomes “egocentric”, “he'll” turns to “hell”, "I'll" to "ill" and “id” to “I’d”, turning any communication into a Freudian slip at the slightest touch or click. People blame Autocorrect for mangling their intentions and for failing to un-mangle them. Autocorrect gets overwhelmed by vocabulary. Every mutation is a persistent or acknowledged mistake and exceptions make language evolve. When the suggested change revolutions the original meaning, the automatic correction allows us to see reality from another angle, funnier usually, embarrassing sometimes, tragic, or even poetic. It allows us to think again. A similar process takes place for an artist in front of his work: an artwork is a major correction. Any creative process involves risks, disruptions or surprises that cancel each other, erase or integrate new meaning. An author corrects his mistakes, autocorrects them and incorporates them into a new reality. The exhibition is an invitation to meaningful mistakes, to disrupt the expected and the established. Every artwork is a spelling mistake.