Condensations

True to its ”work in progress” credo, Mamco continues the Mille et trois plateaux exhibition cycle it launched in 2004 and presents, from 21 February to 7 May 2006, Condensations, a new episode structured around three large monographic displays, together with varied other propositions. A retrospective of the work of the American artist Steven Parrino will be the exhibition's highlight as it is the first ever devoted to this artist. Claude Rutault, a French artist intimately associated with the museum, will be shown on the fourth floor. The most current phase of his work, (p)réparations, illustrates the extent of his reflexions over the act of painting per se. Different continent, different approach with the works of Ivory Coast-born Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. His postcard-size drawings symbolize a miniature encyclopedic knowledge of the world. Shifting (2004), a significant video realized by Alex Hanniman is also included in our new cycle of exhibitions, as are works by Agnieszka Kurant, opening a new chapter of her Exposition qui n'existe pas (the exhibition that does not exist), incorporating works by Stefan Bruggeman, Bertrand Lavier, Gabriel Lester and Stéphane Dafflon. Condensations marks also the reopening of L'Appartement, the exhibition area which duplicates one of the rooms of the French “art dealer” Ghislain Mollet-Viéville's home.

The first retrospective devoted to New York artist Steven Parrino (1958- 2005, USA) is unquestionably one of the exhibition's marking event. Assembled on the third and second floors of the museum are some 200 works, for the most part paintings, but also sculptures, drawings, photographs and films. Curated by Fabrice Stroun, the retrospective has been three years in the making, and involved the active contribution of the artist before he died in an accident on 1 January 2005.

Steven Parrino's paintings are a perfect incarnation of the spirit of a certain era, namely that of a generation of artists fed on urban culture, punk music and Comics. By the end of the Seventies, the artist adopts the monochrome and subjects it to an array of contortions and deformations. Painted mainly in black, his canvasses are often wrenched from their stretchers, lacerated, crumpled or folded before being stretched back, or left as is on the floor. The paintings keep the trace and memory of all the destructions and deformations they were subjected to. In a sense, they make one aware of all the material elements that compose them. Thus mishandled, painting powerfully exposes its materiality and its value as an object.

Besides the monochromes, the retrospective invites the visitor to discover a rich selection of the artist's drawings using motifs appropriated from punk, biker and comics culture. Other sections are devoted to the artist’s sculpture, 16mm film & music and the many collaborations he initiated throughout his career as, for example, with Olivier Mosset and Jutta Koether.

Similarly, Claude Rutault (1941, France) is eager to make painting into an object “as close to the real as possible”. On the fourth floor, the artist shows the most current phase of his work, a collection of several hundred works he did on paper between 1958 and 1973-74, that he decided to repaint entirely in white or gray.

Mamco and the artist have been enjoying a close relationship; an exhibition room (L'inventaire) has been permanently dedicated to his works since 1994. Closed during a year for restructuring, this space will be reopened to the public this next summer. From 1973 on, Claude Rutault paints works he calls “définition/méthode” (d/m); a specific protocol defines the conditions of their existence: from the outset, a series of set parameters is attached to each work with a view to condition its realization, presentation (in a museum, in an art collector's home) and its actualization within a time frame. According to Claude Rutault, the essence of painting is never to be immobile; it is to be “that object that's always moving, as close as possible to reality, that that finds nothing could immobilize it, in what could be (the work's) moment of truth”. In his words, repainting the works he realized before 1973 was to give them a “fresh start”. Far from being a denial of his first works, the act of repainting signifies in his view a way of giving his canvasses a new life, to “set them back into motion”.

The exhibition on the third floor of Ivory Coast-born Frédéric Bruly Bouabré's drawings (Connaissances du monde 1977-2005) was made possible thanks to a very rewarding partnership going back to 1996 between Mamco and the Jean Pigozzi Collection of Contemporary African art (C.A.A.C. The Pigozzi Collection, Geneva) administered by André Magnin; it offered Mamco the opportunity to show some ten african artists. It also follows along the line of Aléas - la ligne, a drawings exhibition that has just closed. Of a complex temperament - philosopher, prophet, artist, sociologist and african griot -, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923, Ivory Coast) tells us that the origin of his works can be linked to an event that occurred in his life in 1948, namely a demand coming from a celestial vision to pass on his knowledge of the world and of his ethnic group, the Bété. The exhibition presents several series of drawings realized by this memory-keeper from the Seventies on, among which the “Musée du visage africain”. Small ballpoint pens and colored pencils drawings made on postcard-size cardboard cards, they mix images and texts to narrate the world at large with its traditions, fairytales and rites.

Moved by a boundless curiosity, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré has been striving since 1948 to decipher, document, interpret and explain man's knowledge. Be it through his inventing a Bété alphabet designed to transcript and fix in writing his oral ethnic culture, or by means of his drawings, he is methodically setting up an inventory of human societies' traditions. He is forever and incessantly trying to keep knowledge from falling into oblivion and to reveal the hidden sense behind the appearance of things.

Both artist and curator, Agnieszka Kurant (1978, Poland) keeps on exploring new curating models with the third phase of her project L'exposition qui n'existe pas. The works of four artists - Stefan Bruggeman, Bertrand Lavier, Gabriel Lester and Stéphane Dafflon - make discreetly their way into the museum to explore the “interstices and gaps engendered by the exhibitions' varied statements”.

Noteworthy too are the projection of Alex Hanniman's Shifting (2004), a video recently acquired by Mamco; the reopening of Appartement II, a permanent showroom hosting the collections of French art dealer Ghislain Mollet-Viéville, closed during a few months for restructuring; and the prolongation till 12 March 2006 of Vincent Lamouroux's metallic sinuous composition Scape (2005) that sprawls the first floor.

Pressetext

Condensations. Mille et trois plateaux, 5th EPISODE

mit Steven Parrino, Claude Rutault, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Agnieszka Kurant, Stefan Bruggeman, Bertrand Lavier, Gabriel Lester, Stephane Dafflon