Marie Cini, Paris
ALMOST NOTHING (LEFT)
From the outside, four white walls and four openings at the corners. Only a green neon light on the wall indicates “Bureau d’échange” – “Exchange booth” – and remains visible (Laurent Mareschal). Could this be an indication of what lies inside, or a simple word game (“Bureau de change” – “Currency exchange” ) that brings the audience to question itself? No matter, this enigma invites to get inside.
On the walls, eight works on paper by Leïla Brett, from the series Grids – Grilles, which began in summer 2011.
These are graph papers, from different sizes and colors, from which the artist has carefully obliterated each square with a white dot. As the graph paper is filled, it changes its meaning, serving as a structure to its own disappearance.
On the ground, the installation by Laurent Mareschal resumes the pattern of the grid in the form of a trompe-l’oeil composed of cubes made out of gravel, which cover the whole floor.
Again, a frame is the initial support of the work, but doomed to disappear under the feet of the public who transforms, even erase, the initial pattern.
The proposition of Leila Brett and Laurent Mareschal, presented by Marie Cini and specially designed for ART-O-RAMA, questions – through the idea of the pattern, notions of time and space – the change of state, variation, random and ephemeral.
While the destruction of the work by Laurent Mareschal is programmed and the time spent to achieve it is lost (the device is more important than the work), in the work by Leïla Brett the result is much more considered than the intimate and meditative process. This time is materialized in the work, offered straight by the work to the viewer.
Initially, almost nothing, in the end almost nothing “left”.
http://www.galeriemariecini.com
