Making Things Happen: French Young Artists - Remix

Making Things Happen: French Young Artists - Remix
23.09.2017 - 08.07.2018

Sylvie Bonnot & Zhu Hong
23 Sept–12 Nov 2017

Elsa Tomkowiak & Mary Sue
24 Nov–26 Jan 2018

Boris Chouvellon & Mengzhi Zheng
20 Apr–8 Jul 2018

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Sylvie Bonnot & Zhu Hong

How does a young artist inscribe herself in the history of photography? The Merchant House (TMH) opens its cycle Making Things Happen: Young Artists in Dialogue with Zhu Hong (1975, FR, born CN) and Sylvie Bonnot (1982, FR), who use photography as a point of departure and idiosyncratic return. They chose to center the show on reciprocal wall art rooted in their approach to work as an itinerant practice, now extending to Amsterdam.

At the core of the dialogue are Amsterdam’s hallmark bridges, photographed by Bonnot. With the expediency of her honed “mue” technique, she is able to reposition the gelatin layer of one of the prints directly on a wall. Face-à-face, Zhu Hong reciprocates by applying her ultrathin painterly gesture in white on white to interpret the image of Bonnot at this actual photo shoot. A complex exhibition radiates from this audacious, ephemeral conception to drive deeply into the territories of photography and painting.

Over the ten-year period following their graduation from ENSA of Dijon (both with distinction), the artists have explored locations—physically on foot and in terms of the movement of the gaze—to ground an expert body of work:

As a student Sylvie Bonnot embarked on research trips with her camera. The natural and urban landscapes in Australia, Japan, Ireland, Norway, Russia and the high valleys of Savoie have informed her multi-faceted oeuvre. In Surimpressions at Quai des Arts, Cugnaux, she made her images jut out from the walls, rupture with lines as drawings, and coagulate as sculptures with a flourish of singular vision and technique. Allowing for the multiplicity of views beyond the planimetric surface of a straight shot, they capture perceptions in relation to her own body and physical movement.

Zhu Hong moved to France to study art in counterpoint to her classical painting training in Shanghai. TMH opens with her entire transcription of the 199 pages of La photographie dans l’art contemporain (French ed., Thames and Hudson, 2004), executed as a long row—to walk along—of 199 drawings in a pencil-on-black, negative/positive take. Also included are a number of paintings and drawings originating from her recent exhibition at Musée de la Roche-sur-Yon, which followed her work at the prehistory museum in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil. These images reflect on museum displays in their essential institutional settings, both precious and everyday.

According to Hubert Besacier, who has followed the careers of both artists from early on, their paths were meant to cross. Placed in dialogue at TMH, they draw attention to the materiality and conceptual possibilities of their mediums, with the work at once bound to the reality of its origins and creation, and defying simple interpretation.

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Elsa Tomkowiak & Mary Sue

In celebration of Amsterdam Art Weekend 2017, The Merchant House has asked Elsa Tomkowiak and Mary Sue to interpret the gallery’s building, rich with Golden Age symbolism, as a contemporary public sphere. Using both spoofing techniques and serious art, they—Tomkowiak in painting and Mary Sue in video, sculpture, and photography—join forces to give the interior topography a provoking and provocative face-lift. In so doing, the artists also address individually, and emphatically with respect to their art, the underlying theme of TMH’s Making Things Happen: Young Artists in Dialogue cycle: How does a young artist inscribe herself in the history of an art medium? In the case of Mary Sue and Tomkowiak, the question refers to performance and a performative gesture in art making.

With a chance to exploit her adopted identity to the full, Mary Sue decks herself out as a trim housemaid to burnish the canonical fixtures of the Amsterdam bourgeois residence. Bent on a dramatic entry and transgressing the cannons of working with paint, Tomkowiak opens the space up to the spirit of liberty and munificence. French artists of the same generation and artistic formation, Tomkowiak and Mary Sue have featured in solo and group shows as well as festival commissions. They are on a mission to experiment:

Elsa Tomkowiak (1981, FR) has been in search of the most radical painting tools beginning with her art studies at ENSA of Dijon. Reflecting her predilection for an open gesture and the day-glow colors of a personal gradient, her earliest color interventions were made in the snow and on large vinyl surfaces suspended above industrial waste. Wielding broom-like brushes, she adopted a method of applying layers of multicolored paint to translucent or solid bands of plastic sheeting, or to massive spheres that can be positioned to redirect light and restructure the space. Her recent commissions and residencies include a swimming pool (Mönchengladbach), an opera house (Nantes), an abbey (Angers), two bridges (Saint-Gervais, Quebec), the glasshouse of a spa (Pougues-les-eaux), as well as landscaping during major urban events (Offenbach am Main, Amiens, Verdun).

Mary Sue states that otherness starts within oneself, that she was born between 1979 and sometime now, and that her gender identity might be female or science (also relating to her top performance in physics) fictional. Under this sobriquet, she has pursued a relentless career (not by-passing ENSA of Dijon for art studies) performing in her own videos, making costumes and decor, posters and books, but also sculptures, installation objects, and photographs—all fabricated to perfection by hand and surrounding the exploits of the brilliant, fictive Mary Sue. According to co-curator Hubert Besacier, we find her in situations—be it in a gallery show or on display at a Nike store—that are “totally desperate, and therefore hilarious.” Mary Sue’s crafted take on childhood and loss, La Flotte, was seen this summer desperately afloat on the river in Amiens, France, for the Art, villes et paysage festival.

Sweeping through TMH’s walls, floors, windows, ceilings, and terraces with the exigency of their craft, both artists construct a probing play of color as a cultural value. With confident proficiency in their medium, they are able to create a unique artistic exchange that invites viewers to join in and enjoy. The relational and artistic aspects of their dialogue are, however, both real and illusory, intimating telling slippages in modern day sociability and bonding.