Olivier Robert, Paris

It’s a pretty classic magical trick: you tighten a rope, fold it, cut it in several pieces, blow on it, and when you stretch it out again, a marvel of illusion, it appears intact. The project conceived by the Olivier Robert gallery for the Art-O-Rama contemporary art fair is of the same type: a similar link, between tension and rupture, ties the works of the five artists presented.
The dark contained violence of Boogie’s photographs is mirrored by the impression of light and exorcised violence of Eric Pougeau’s works on paper. The drippings of Julien Beneyton’s watercolours reverberate in the impeccable varnishes of Lionel Scoccimaro’s sculptures, just as they do, when they defy the smooth and cold touch of Elodie Lesourd’s paintings.
However, all these cuts are necessary to the final montage, to the writing of a new story. This is how we come to find the echoes of Eric Pougeau’s silences and Boogie’s wild and menacing characters in the middle of the deserted and silent spaces of Elodie Lesourd’s paintings. Ghostly presences, verging on the invisible, like the beings that escape us and whose every detail Julien Beneyton’s obsessive brush constantly tries to reveal to us. And in this labor below the surface, closest to reality, Lionel Scoccimaro takes part in this homage to the unspeakable and the underground. Helmeted beings invite themselves to this harmonious dance, led by a strange string quintet, obviously magical.

Benjamin Bianciotto
Translation : Lucy Pike

http://galerieolivierrobert.com