Antoine Grulier
Born in 1990, lives and works in Hyères les Palmiers and Paris.
Our meeting with Antoine Grulier took place in a spa set up in a homeware store located in an industrial zone called Les Palmiers(The Palm Trees) in the suburbs of Hyères (south-eastern France). And thus, far removed from the town’s seven thousand palm trees and its Villa Noailles– a bona fide rationalist architectural attraction which through its high-quality interdisciplinary programming had a sizable impact on the development of the artist. A graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Marseille Méditerranée, Marseille, his work owes as much to the influence of the Azur (French Riviera), as to the group Supports/Surfaces[1]as to 1990’s Californian aesthetics among which one can list Harmony Korine’s Beautiful Losers, Mike Kelley’s Destroy All Monstersand Twin Peaks’ emblematic Laura Palmer[2]. Invested in both individual and collective ways of working, his projects subvert constantly and not without humour, the codes of production (he is particularly prolific), promotion and even consumption of design, fashion and contemporary art. As part of his involvement in the 2019 showroom, he has imagined an installation that replays the very ritual of the exhibition. He accomplishes this by reconfiguring the booth into the set of a potential photoshoot. He thus revisits certain displays conceived in the context of magazine launches, and in particular the display conceived for Temple[3], a publication to which he has frequently contributed. Thus, on entering the space, the public becomes a witness or accomplice of a possible photoshoot. invited to discover sculptures halfway between cynic and ceramics, living pictures enhanced with lilies, T-shirts hanging on the walls and plinths designed according to the plans laid out by Donald Judd. Exit the minimalist asceticism of the wooden seats and anodized aluminium of the American, the young artist operates his punk version. During which the props, once purified, now adorn themselves with bluish, orange or sunrise tie-dye colours, and abandon their original functions to become plinths and displays in their own right, all set against the heady sent of liliums in Marseille’s summer heat.
furiosa, July 2019
[1]The artists of Supports/Surfacesanalyse the constituent elements of painting by working towards the deconstruction and dismantling of the traditional easel painting. They explore the resources of textiles through cutting, turning front to back, folding, staining, marking, stapling, braiding (…) in order to re-establish a unity between pictorial practices and the material mediums (supports) of painting. By stripping bare the wooden stretcher bar and making use of free canvas they allow themselves to no longer view a painting as a projective screen, but instead as a surface with which to occupy space. Press release, Les années Supports I Surfaces dans les collections du Centre Georges Pompidou, 19thof May – 30thof August 1998, Pompidou Centre, Paris.
[2]Take note that Laura Palmer has even become a commercial phenomenon in her own right, a cocktail bears her name on the menu at Sqirl, 720 Virgil Avenue, Los Angeles, California.
[3]Temple is an independent magazine devoted to art, fashion and experimental graphic design founded by Anaïs Allias and Margaux Salarino in 2017.
