UNIDENTIFIED LINE

Opening 31st March 6 pm

Responding to Contemporary Drawing Fair[1], the exhibition Unidentified line presents a set of works breaking of with the tradition of pencil on paper. This in then not an exhibition of drawings but an exhibition talking about a more conceptual practice of the drawing. The artistic work materializes by removal of material, by movements of the image or by an accumulation of gesture. The artist becomes by turns poet or dreamer, storytelling forms or utopias hunter. Each work invites us to new horizons, to some territory or some place where identification is neither immediate nor unequivocal.

These « Unidentified » lines call in our own interpretation, pushing us to excite our curiosity and imagination. Let our minds drift to these « country of nowhere » recalling probably the first Utopia, written by Thomas More[2]. Those fantastic stories are often considered as the precursor of science fiction, those supernatural utopian may appeared according to our sensitivity as travelogue or as cosmic narrative.

This Unidentified could remind us the search and the discovery of « Another world », that we can meet in the Etats et Empires de la Lune of Cyrano de Bergerac[3]. Striking appartition of the 17th century where the supernatural allows by a satiric eloquence to venture the most clever criticism against his own contemporaries. Let us guide by some drawings with unidentified line, a few pieces of paper turning, in the blink of an eye, into slender craft going towards … !

[1] Drawing Now, Contemporary drawing fair, 30th March – 3rd April 2016 at Carreau du Temple. The gallery will be exhibiting on booth C7.

[2] Utopia of Thomas More appeared in 1516. The book is at the origin of the neologism « utopia », litteraly « place which is nowhere ».

[3] L’Autre monde or les Etats et Empires de la lune of Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) are written in 1650 and appeared after the death of the author in 1657 under le title given by the editor : Histoire comique. This text fall within a long tradition of travel in de sapce and on the moon, from Lucien de Samosate (120–180) to Francis Godwin (1562–1633).