Crèvecœur, Paris
Crèvecoeur is happy to present a show by four artists who question two common formal issues in art history : line and relief.
The photographs (Naked Eye) by Erica Baum, featuring open books, set up landscapes composed by characters who seem to slide between lines – lines created by the text of the book itself and edges of the paper. A relief appears, paradoxically given by the flattening of the photographic image : everything is on the same plan; it creates a strange depth of the surface.
Mick Peter’s process can be considered formally as a reverse process. His sculptures are precisely reliefless or, if there is some, it is assumed as fake avoiding any kind of realism. Characters appear in the space as paper beings – effect strengthened by the drawing which fills in the sculpture’s blank area, in a cartoon drawing way.
Relief is more perceptible in Florian and Michael Quistrebert’s White Gradient. The artists use the gesso twisting it from its original function to create relief. Thus, the White Gradient, near the bas-relief, reveals itself as an architectural element separated from its initial context – archeological remains of a vanished building.
For the Offshore sculptures, Xavier Antin has been inspired by the structures that hold the common «Home for sale» in United States. His research has lead him to the construction of a white structure that draws like a line in the space – structure which holds a print which is the result of experimentations and distortions on an ink printer. The relief in this very image, simply hanging inside a metal structure, appears in the accidents of its surface.
