gb agency, Paris
Dominique Petitgand, Roman Ondak
Dominique Petitgand
“Describing his works as “filled with silence”, Dominique Petitgand seems most interested in the interstitial spaces between quiet and noise, the raw voice and the articulation of words–he focuses on the art of listening rather than simply the production of sound…
The narrative, like the melodies elsewhere in Petitgand’s works, is unresolved but rich with allusions to shared expressions, emotions, and actions. The words spoken in his works are never scripted–rather, they come from recorded interviews and conversations with friends and family. The artist’s works are dated to the year of the earliest recording and that of the moment he installs the gathered sounds in a particular place. But although Petitgand records all of the sounds himself–none are “found”– the origin of the sounds is less important than the memories and associations that these fragments can awaken.” Lillian Davies
Roman Ondak
“Life has its patterns and procedures, and so too does Conceptual art – Roman Ondak makes the two connect. His simple but carefully thought-out and symbolically charged acts and interventions are designed to scrutinize some of the institutions and practices that shape our daily life. It is the conceptual rigour with which Ondak approaches these practices that gives his works their imaginative power, enabling them to pinpoint hairline cracks in the surface of normality and to highlight their underlying instabilities. The minute displacements and subtle twists that he introduces into the nooks and crannies of quotidian life can be electrifying in their implications, demanding and at the same time defying interpretation.” Jan Verwoert. In this work, Ondak takes a generic dialogue used for basic language learning and adapts it each time to represent an interview with himself and the person who is presenting the work, in this case Jérôme Pantalacci, director of art-o-rama Marseille. The simple gesture creates a timeless, and endless exchange in which both speakers use a same language, metaphorically meeting at a same level of understanding to establish a new dialogue.