"Entre chien et loup (*)" by Charlotte Puertas
from 12/01/2012 to 14/02/2012
« Entre chien et loup » (*)
The expression “between dog and wolf” appeared in French in the 13th century but its origins are much older. Indeed, a text from the 2nd century includes the phrase « when a man cannot distinguish a dog from a wolf “. “Between dog and wolf” designates the evening or the morning, the times of the day when it is too dark to tell the difference between a dog and a wolf. The dog symbolizes the day since, with the light it can guide us, while the wolf is the symbol of the night, representing a threat, but also nightmares and fear.
Animation, video, drawing with biro or felt pens, watercolors, gouache, acrylic, pastels are the various techniques I use and which mix to create drawings, intimate visions of the world or hybrid artworks which endlessly bring us back to what is most pure but also most tormented in our existence. Here, men are covered with petals and seem to carry a burden, there, two hands intertwine… Elsewhere, the beautiful Pandora opens her famous box from which escape colourful and whirling aches… What is the colour of hope hidden at the very bottom of the box? Vegetation invades, spills out, spreads and gathers until it sometimes reaches beyond the frame… and the petals become almost one with the bodies which are fragmented, veiled and walking backwards…
(*) French expression meaning « between dog and wolf »
"How words come to paintings" by Olivier Gourvil
from 16/02/2012 to 26/03/2012
Gourvil’s anthropomorphism is filtered through an immense repertoire of sign-structures, some sifted through urban signs or the signs of the body as seen in comics or graphics. Some of the paintings’ forms can have the look of architectural plans, pre-fabricated design units, the bulbous forms of graffiti or elements from modernist painting. These are usually intertwined with Gourvil’s emphatic linear demarcations of diagrammatic volumes and his playful sense of protuberance and organicism. This emphasis on drawing in space and the clarity of line leads to an almost icon-like presentation of form – with their centrally focused events, concentrated form, and anthropomorphic connotations. If the traditional notion of the icon is rooted in resemblance (in its usual context, the copy of a divine original, the copy providing a material link to the original, thus ensuing a transference of presence) then in Gouvil’s painting this implication is reversed. Through the processes of drawing - developing into painting - he is searching out a fecundity of form and connotation that has no basis in an original underlying model; the iconic form in this context might well embrace various allusions but loops back to its own materiality, its own clarity of being held as an image in the mind.
David Ryan, « Almost...but ...Not Quite» , 2009, ed. Analogues
Previous exhibition(s)
"En long, en large, en travers... et surtout en travers" by Elodie Boutry
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 18/10/2011 to 01/01/2012
"Si j'avais un inconscient je le saurais" by Jerome Boutterin
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 13/09/2011 to 14/10/2011
"The painter Jérôme Boutterin is wary of painting but, nonetheless, in no way does he desire to leave it be. He alludes to the heroic abstraction, the spontaneous and immediate gesture, the potency of the infinite "overall"- and presents it all as a refraction, a simulation, a quest for meaning of an autonomous painting situated between abstraction and newfound reality.
The unrestrained momentum of his painting is bridled only with difficulty through the intelligence which he dissects the foundations of his work. At the end of an examination into the potentialities of abstract painting that has persisted for both generations and decades, nothing is new or self-evident anymore. But the elements can be found, as in the case of Jérôme Boutterin, with sovereign ease and almost in passing, assembled anew in a fresh, surprising entirety."
"The "monochromes" avail themselves indeed to only one single unadulterated colour, but what they depict is anything but a homogeneous, monochromatic surface: the apparently intact composition reveals itself as a labyrinthine inter-related reticulation of framentary abbreviations – a horror vacui of painting, a bulging depositery ready to burst – in which the individual gesture, and the juxtaposition of the seemingly directionless experimentation of disparate brushwork, rocaille and lines, surfaces and hachure, metamorphoses into prodigously dynamic celebration of the putatively pure colour and its contaminates – or, better, its mutability in application and handling. The colour discloses all its factitious sensuality, confidently inflecting its palette of possibilities."
Dr Martin Engler, head of Painting and sculpture after 1945. Städel Museum, Frankfurt / Main.
"Still happy" by Samuel Buckman
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 21/06/2011 to 08/09/2011
Samuel Buckman treats since ten years every types of mediums, probes places and spaces. Again and always. Proof is this new exhibition, presented in a hotel. From the entrance, two photos untitled Solitude suggest the capacity of attention, the mobility of a glance without filter, kept open. Opened to what ? To enigma. Of places, things, persons. Who is this man, masked by a face smiling and sticking out his tongue ? Comedy of the identity, that of the artist himself, who composes this Self-Portrait in Berlin from a mask picked during the May 1st demonstration in the German capital. Still here. The mask points out a presence, one here and now. What appears here? Not much and a lot at the same time. Small nothingness which tell the happiness to be crossed by the world, which shows through the mobility of a vision and the acuteness of a language. The art as a dual opening, the glance and the sense. Still happy.
"Putting at stake" by Caroline Culand
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 03/05/2011 to 14/06/2011
Ludic work that stops at the moment when everything is put at stake.
All tricks are possible: interlockings, multiplications, superimpositions, transparencies, sketching out a hollow or a relief...
Formal analogy, remote similarity, memory of the real: all these words echo my work.
In analogy, there is assimilating action, which makes some shapes change under the influence of other shapes to which they are associated.
As for memory, it is selective, it remembers or forgets: I keep the shape or movement that has stayed in my mind, the one that persists.
A way to come closer to a certain idea of sincerity.
"The hotel collection" by Caroline Delmotte, Eric Cloutier, Jean-marc Thommen, Frederic Prat, Olivier Breuil...
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 01/12/2010 to 02/05/2011
Between the various exhibitions organised in the hotel galery, we are presenting our own collection of artworks purshased from the artists previously exhibited.
"Olivier Filippi - Drawings and paintings" by Olivier Filippi
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 07/10/2010 to 30/11/2010
You could say the process behind the series of drawings is the reverse of the process behind the paintings. The size of the drawings is always small, and the point is not to dwell too long upon a specific form.
The point is: improvisation. It happens quickly and with a dose of blindness on my part.
The initial data condition, in part, the final aspect of each series: the choice of paper, the choice of colours and the kind of marker pens, the number of colours and the number of times any given colour will be used and for which lines… All this is resonating with a sort of game of redistribution of surfaces.
Usually, I place several sheets of paper on the table, either with no specific order or sometimes following a pattern which is more or less pre-established. Then I draw on this set of sheets. The lines, hence, sort of follow themselves up from one sheet to the next, and I very rarely spend time reflecting upon what’s happening on a particular sheet. Then I change the layout of the sheets on the table (most often but not always), I draw again, and so on and so on… It can last quite a while. As I go along, I withdraw the sheets I think are “finished” from the set.
When there’s nothing left on the table, I have a series of drawings.
"What is it ?" by Jean-Marc THOMMEN
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 08/04/2010 to 30/06/2010
THE SHOW IS EXTENDED UNTIL END OF JUNE
"In recent months, it is rare that I spend the day in the studio without completing one or several drawings. The time spent in their development is uneven: the first line, the place granted to the color, the entry of something unforeseen, little by little the drawings establish their own outcome.
Some seem immediate, the others appear very elaborate. For the Hotel Elysees Mermoz, I‘ve selected the ones without decorative content, the ones that question the gaze.
The line that traditionally determines a form , the line that traditionally encircles a recognizable shape, is released from any representation."
"TRAVELLING ROBOTS" by Eric
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 21/11/2009 to 31/01/2010
Hotel Elysees Mermoz at the lower end of the Champs-Elysees, is both a boutique hotel and a gallery. At the initiative of its director, Olivier Breuil, himself an artist, the hotel unveils contemporary works in which photography, painting and design mix. Until January 31st, 2010, the hotel welcomes Eric Cloutier and his series “Traveling Robots.”
Born in Montreal and having lived in New York, The Hague and now Paris, Eric Cloutier is the perfect model of the urban nomad for whom the journey is the key motivation of his existence. Leading an artistic life at the same time as pursuing a career in finance, he finds it important to understand the city in which he is living. For him, each town has its own energy and personality. It is the memories of his travels that form the heart of his artworks, a mix of photography, drawing and graphic design. Modern, his works are inhabited by robots, a nod to his childhood during which he collected vintage robots.
“Traveling Robots arises from a personal interpretation of different places I have lived in or visited. These locations are the protagonists of my art. The robots, curious and humorous, also travel across my artworks, replacing me in telling the story of my observations and memories”, says the artist. We can observe that the artwork representing London refers to the cover of the album “Abbey Road” by the Beatles. Inspired by Japanese futuristic art and the representation of surreal universes by artists such as David LaChapelle and Matthew Barney, Eric Cloutier’s works are resolutely contemporary and high-tech. For instance, the artwork of Montreal, in which a giant iPod is walking a dog robot on a leash, evokes the Summer music scene of the city.
"Etoiles noires" by Caroline DELMOTTE
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 25/09/2009 to 12/11/2009
"La série "Étoiles noires" est née d'une demande d'Olivier Breuil, de l'hôtel Élysées-Mermoz, qui l'accueille aujourd'hui. Il s'agissait de trouver trois images pour une des salles de l'hôtel.
Ce fut l'occasion pour moi d'une plongée au coeur de mes archives d'où je remontais, outre les trois images en question, tout un ensemble de photos qui m'ont servi à construire cette série.
Elle s'est donc constituée en plusieurs strates, certaines assez anciennes et d'autres tout à fait récentes.
Différents lieux, différents moments cohabitent, comme dans notre mémoire, et s'assemblent pour ne plus faire qu'une seule image, qu'un seul instant.
Chaque instant en voisine un autre, et tous sont traversés par une silhouette, des étoiles noires qui les relient et tissent un ensemble plus large, une histoire, une suite; une poursuite.
Qui poursuit qui? Quoi?
Questions parmi d'autres, sans doute...
À chacun de se les approprier librement.
Je souhaite que mes images proposent un peu de cette liberté."
"Soo-Kyoung LEE" by Soo-Kyoung LEE
at the Élysées-Mermoz Hotel, from 01/07/2009 to 24/09/2009
"L'abstraction pour moi est le lieu universel, dénudé d’image, de représentation, et sans la moindre interprétation. C'est une manifestation de la pensée libérée de tout carcan culturel, social ou identitaire.
Mon souci est de montrer l’étonnement du regard qui soulève notre questionnement sur la liberté.
Chacun de mes travaux propose, par des structures singulières du plan, différentes humeurs qui sont pour moi des épreuves de chaque instant intense et présent de l’être pensant.
Je souhaite partager ce travail avec le regard du monde désireux de découvrir l’inattendu; ce regard est le reflet des êtres libres que nous sommes."
