In Situ fabienne leclerc, Paris
Daniele Genadry & Marina De Caro & Gerald Petit
For this new edition of Art-O-Rama, we presents a dialogue between three artists from the gallery, bringing together the work of Daniele Genadry (Americano-Lebanese), Marina de Caro (Argentinian) and Gerald Petit (French-Portugese). Expressing theirself in unique universes, their works have yet in common to seeking link with the viewer by engaging a relation by exploring the capacity of the painting, the photography or the sculpture to express emotions, feelings, sensations whether they be reflective, engaging or dreamlike.
Daniele Genadry works with painting, photography and print, to examine conditions and contemporary forms of seeing, particularly those present in postwar Lebanon. Her practice considers the potential of an image to generate its own temporality (light), and to create a mediated field of vision that sensitizes our consciousness. Often based on landscape motifs, the paintings seek, through their material surface, to act physically on the viewers’ eyes, requiring a time of focus and adjustment, in order to apprehend the (painted) image. Their aim is to give a heightened and intense view – and an image form to a particular quality and force – of presence, fragility and disappearance.
Marina De Caro is an Argentinian visual artist from Buenos Aires, one of the most influential Latin American artists of her generation. She inhabits the world as a painter, a draughtswoman, a dancer, a knitter, a teacher, a performer… She constantly reinvents space, amplifying it with unfamiliar gestures, liberating petrified geometries. She pushes back the limits of the expected to give existence to that which vibrates and invigorates, to that which surprises the norm, the habit, the conventional. To that which disconcerts. Developing a multi-disciplinary body of work integrating drawing, sculpture and performance, Marina De Caro experiments with notions of space, bodily experience, intuition and emotion within a colorful universe that she also use as a militant voice in our world. Her installations unfold in a sensitive, poetic space, often taking the form of flexible, mobile sculptures. Drawing being the initial and fundamental step in all her projects, several scale works on paper will be exposed for the occasion of the fair. Alongside them, original and unseen aluminum wire sculptures will invite viewers to consider the place of their bodies within a sensitive space and environment.
Gerald Petit has long practiced painting and photography in parallel, in a confrontation of painting towards the infinite technological possibilities offered by digital photography and retouching software to demonstrate the possibility of painting, still, not “in spite of” digital photography but “with” or “beyond” it. His deep skies vibrating under the faint light of a moon obscured by clouds, portraits of his mother, or hands depicted in strange rituals draw on the intersecting histories of the two mediums. The blacks in his paintings are never obtained by using black paint, but by adding the colors of the palette. The blacks reveal themselves, revealing the subject of the paintings in the same way as the photographic image is revealed in chemical baths, or as any digital image is revealed by the addition of red, green and blue pixels. In his skies, the superimposed colors develop the black of the paint. These twilight skies don’t exist anywhere, their blackness is impossible because they are endowed with the vibrating reddish, bluish, greenish dimension that gives them their singular depth, and whose artifice is revealed on the edges of the frames, revealing the leftovers and overhangs of the colors used. Each sky is an unreal, mental projection, created by a series of alchemical gestures that transmute color into sooty obscurity, transforming the liquid matter of paint into a gaseous evanescence penetrated only by the pale light of an invisible moon. The series of paintings featuring hands, three of which are in the FRAC Auvergne collection, have their origins in studies of hands as painted by Nicolas de Largillière in the 18th century or Ingres in the 19th century. In a phantasmatic apparition, a hand emerges from the darkness of the painting.
