Both had instinctively rejected the so-called “classical” techniques and forms of sculpture, a sentiment César and Hiquily had felt almost from the moment they entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where they shared seats in the Gimond studio. Moreover, in the harsh post-war period, “noble” materials were too expensive for young artists. Thus, with delight, they preferred to dive into junkyards and industrial wastelands, transforming themselves into true “scrap metal dealers” of art. For both Hiquily, a genius of balances and improbable pairings, and César, a true poet of the dynamic physical processes from compression to expansion, discarded scraps became a major source of inspiration, which they gladly shared.
At the Centre Pompidou’s “Bande Dessinée, 1964-2024” retrospective, you can admire works by Philippe Druillet, one of the leading French authors of futuristic comics. Since Le mystère des abîmes, his first book published in 1966, Philippe Druillet has been one of the French cartoonists who revolutionized science fiction comics.
Beginning with the advent of the counter-culture in the 1960s, this exhibition looks back at the modern and contemporary history of the ninth art in its three main areas of expression: European creation, Asian manga and American comics.
Creating links between different authors, the “Comics, 1964-2024” exhibition allows visitors to discover their creative processes, while grouping them around common themes present in their works, such as memory, dreams and anticipation. This retrospective also focuses on the emotions conveyed by comics, and on the artistic techniques specific to each artist.
This is what Philippe Druillet says in the podcast Visites d’expos, in which he looks back on his mythical works and discusses his technique and influences.
“So I have a technique that isn’t really a technique, but I go into a trance. I’m not in control at all and I let myself be guided. I break from the real world − phone calls or whatever − and I enter another world, and that’s where it develops.”
“That’s what is so interesting about science fiction, developing human behaviour and the ways in which we create and destroy.”
Podcast Exhibition Visits : Future Fiction, with Philippe Druillet
Curated by : Anne Lemonnier et Emmanuèle Paye
For further information: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/program/calendar/event/9htHbj4
Galerie Loft presents a fascinating selection of works by Dado, spanning a ten-year period from 1986 to 1996. In Dado’s paintings, human, animal and invertebrate forms intermingle to give rise to troubling figures.
The year 1986 marks a decisive turning point in DADO’s life, with his discovery of Buffon and his immersion in the fascinating world of natural history, which is deeply reflected in his work.
Through his sculptures, Quentin Garel explores the raw beauty and vulnerability of animals, creating pieces that evoke both the strength and fragility of wildlife.
Together, the works of DADO and Quentin Garel weave a fascinating dialogue on the nature of human and animal existence, exploring themes of transformation, metamorphosis and coexistence.
Video: Guided tour by the exhibition curator, Thierry VEBRE
Galerie Loft invites you to dive into the captivating world of science fiction through the unique creatures of Quentin Garel. All his “Monozygotes” will take over the space at 4 rue des beaux-arts! On this occasion, come and discover the new work “Monozygotic” from the collection Art For All by Galerie Loft.
When he shapes his works, Quentin Garel works with the material with an obvious love for organic forms. Exploring their materiality while deliberately playing with our perceptions, its changes of scale, sometimes excessive or hybridized, disturb our representation of what exists. For Christine Argot and Luc Vivès, in his Osthéomorphoses “he combines the Beautiful and the False, which nevertheless seems true – a distorted, falsely specular reflection of reality! He is a naturalist artist, collector of extraordinary skulls gleaned from his mind.” In his work on the Monozygote, a phantasmagorical bird skull in a tripod, he thus crystallizes in the same work his concern, but also a certain derision, for the destiny of animals, as much as humans, in the heart of a world in full swing. mutation.
Exhibition “Monozygotes” by Quentin Garel until January 12, 2024.
VIDEO
The artist takes us behind the scenes of his creation and the story of Monozygote.
Du 13 novembre 2023 au 27 janvier 2024, L’Orangerie de Cachan vous invite à découvrir l’univers singulier d’Antonio Seguí, illustre peintre d’origine argentine disparu en février 2022.
Exposition d’une cinquantaine de pastels d’Antonio Seguí
Cette exposition est l’une des rares à présenter une série de pastels de l’artiste aussi importante. Cette technique était prisée du peintre, car elle lui permettait de représenter rapidement les impressions de la vie et de la ville qu’il captait.
Antonio Seguí et ses œuvres ont parcouru le monde, mais l’homme était attaché à Arcueil et à Cachan où il avait tissé de fortes amitiés humaines et artistiques. En lien avec cette exposition, une soirée de tango avec le duo Juanjo Mosalini et Vincent Bögeholz sera proposée à L’Orangerie le 11 janvier, jour de l’anniversaire de l’artiste. Par ailleurs, la version courte du documentaire réalisé par François Cartonné et consacré à Antonio Seguí, El gran teatro del mundo, sera diffusée durant toute la durée de l’exposition.
Exposition Antonio Seguí : Regards croisés à L’Orangerie,
du 13 novembre 2023 au 27 janvier 2024, 15 rue Gallieni, Cachen
Vernissage le jeudi 16 novembre à 19h. Entrée libre.
Horaires d’ouverture : du lundi au samedi de 10h à 12h et de 14h à 18h ; le jeudi jusqu’à 19h. Fermeture les samedis 23 et 30 décembre 2023.
Yazid Oulab presents his new solo show “La flamme germe” at SELMA FERIANI Gallery in Tunisia.
Exhibition until 23 April 2022.
In conversation with Yazid Oulab
A pictorial connection to learning
Growing up in the arms of his grandmother, the first vision Yazid Oulab opened his eyes to were the Amazigh symbols inked onto her skin. She was the cave and cradle that introduced him to this image in his early years. Having grown up surrounded by lines, dots and their intersections, his relationship to learning was quite complex but strongly pictorial and imaginative. The image was built and anchored in his retina long before he went to art school, which he joined at the age of twenty-two. And what if letters were indeed drawings? An «A» could be a fish with a missing dot and the «B» is the unison of two rings and a line.
His path was by no means random, defined from his maternal cradle, to the elementary school where he perceived form and geometry, to the school where he learned to draw and paint full time. He gave himself the means to drive his learning well from Algeria, Paris and then Luminy in Marseille; a rather familiar context for a person who grew up in the countryside with an eye that carries very far.
Approaching the sphere, the cone and the cylinder
As soon as Oulab arrived in France, he began to question concepts, to reflect on the poetics of things, on their primary and figurative meaning. He was asked the question «how do you express yourself through a tree?». This was the starting
point of reflection upon where he comes from, his context and the beginning of everything. The answer holds genealogical roots that later become the foundation of his formal research.
Coming from a family that is both intellectual and working class, his upbringing joins together poetry and work. If he were to symbolize this with an image; then he has simply found the nail that brings writing and labor together. A link, an anchor and a fixture that allows him to hang on to the universal art history.
«What is interesting about the nail is that it draws from the history of art and the energy of creation. Cézanne, the father of modernity, thought that nature should be treated by the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. And if these objects were put into action; The sphere can inscribe the curve, the cylinder when laid draws a line and the cone when it turns draws a circle.»
From the line to the curve to the circle, Oulab thus draws from a pillar of his Arab-Muslim culture, the Koran that he considers as a literary and scientific reference. More specifically, he draws from a fundamental surah which begins with «Alif, Lam, Mim». These letters are outlined from the cone, the cylinder and the sphere, just like the nail. «And if we contemplate all this, we would have understood everything. I only notice the forms and the gesture of the creators. What interests me is to always go towards the source and the beginning.»
To ponder the object in gesture and geometry; such was Oulab’s approach to his works. He contemplates the gesture in the literalness, expressing and making an expression. These go hand in hand in his approach. Based on his culture which places importance on action and literature, he draws a link anchored by a nail of the cuneiform writing towards the gesture of the worker who builds with his tools where the tool itself is , object and subject of creation. From the hollow writing with a drill on a fragile paper or barbed wire tracing words, he blurs the use of rough materials in installations that draw up the relationship between the signifier and the signified.
La Flamme Germe
La flamme germe carries its roots in the bud of an event that shook the universe, in an invisible gesture that decided the course of the earth. At the moment of standstill, nature only returns to itself, to bend and to search in its core.
Searching for the source of everything, Yazid Oulab turned to the quantum theory; the idea that the universe began as dimensions folded to one moved the artist to retrace the beginning and to find the source. In his quest for the core, Oulab studied the history of art beginning from the traveling monks that carried their manuscripts preserved by leather pouches. The intellectual object containing the most fragile first drafts, was always preserved by a protective layer and carried like a bundle.
The foundation of Oulab’s work lies in questioning the literalness of gestures and their interactions. The object that travels and serves to receive the reflection of its holder is always buried under a thousand folds of words, letters and protected by fabric. Always in a dichotomous ratio to the wrapped object and its envelope, the Persian miniature was wrapped by the painting. By deploying the relationship of cause to effect, the work of the earth is done with tools. If the tools germinated from the earth itself, the body of work becomes itself made of the material that constitutes it.
The flame rises from the germination, sprouting the tool and the tool becomes matter to think and matter to create. The text in our case serves as a seed, a fundamental element in our culture which at the base rises from letters, from «Alif, Lam, Mim». «It’s the way we think about writing, it’s like the whole universe is made of string, according to the string theory. Writing is like thin lines, little strings where words and sentences are enclosed in the universe.»
In the same vein, the energy of creation or even the quantum phenomenon draws up meaning, the original and intellectual flow. Preserved by this layer of paint, not to adorn it but to envelop it and give it meaning from its external image without the need of pointing a direction, but rather from a radical gesture like a worker who with a firm one defines the signified object.
After a beautiful launch a year ago, the Art for All collection is now expanding with new pieces in order to continue its vocation to democratize art, offering more diversity while retaining the accessibility.
After being enriched throughout the year with the introduction of editions such as La Girouette Hiver by Philippe Hiquily, Amour Fou by Claude Gilli, or inflatable furniture by Bernard Quentin, there are now three unpublished editions, in collaboration with three new artists (Yazid Oulab, Antonio Segui and Richard Texier), who join the collection.
These works will be presented from December 2, 2021 to January 29, 2022 during a group exhibition to promote the works of all the artists who have collaborated on this beautiful project. You will find sculptures, but also monumental works, design and art furniture or paintings that will offer us a more in-depth look at their respective works.
So come and discover in the two spaces of the LOFT Gallery, each work of this collection thought, chosen and developed with the artist is offered in a limited series, numbered and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity sold between 200 and 600 euros, with a view to offering more universal access to artworks. Real works in small formats but whose creativity, authenticity, quality and commitment will make you smile or dream.
A concentrate of Art … for All.
For any purchase of an “Art For All” work during the exhibition, the shipping across Europe will be offered as well as an automatic registration for the contest “Win a work of art”.
Follow us the contests on our instagram.
The draw: Saturday January 29.
Galerie Loft is pleased to announce that the “Molécul’air” armchair, the “Croissant” armchair and the monumental sculpture “ART” by Bernard Quentin have been selected by the Center Pompidou-Metz to be part of the AERODREAM exhibition !
Aerodream. Architecture, design and inflatables, 1950-2020
If the dream of flying has accompanied man since Icarus, it is really with the idea of an inflatable sheath, taking the place of the deployment of wings, that it became effective starting from the 18th century. The history of inflatables, parallel with that of aeronautics, is that of the development of a more organic relationship to the aerial. The sheath is a metaphor for the skin, a protection for the body, enabling an immediate proximity with the air. The inflatable carries within itself the idea of the pneuma of breathing; an immediate relationship to the living, to the event, to life.
The exhibition reveals this human dimension of the «pneumatic», from the first industrial and military exploitations (airships, weather balloons, floating assemblies, inflatable decoys…) to the experiences developed by numerous artists designers and architects.
In the middle of the 20th century the appearance of new materials (rubber and derivatives, plastics, woven fishnet…) multiplied the possible uses and practical applications of inflatable structures.
In keeping with the “achieved utopia” by Richard Buckminster Fuller, numerous architects gave inflatables an architectonic credibility, such as Victor Lundy, Walter Bird, Frei Otto, Gernot Minke, Cedric Price and Arthur Quarmby. In May 1967, a symposium on the subject created a stir in Stuttgart and would constitute the reference for the collectives in search of mobile and modular architecture like Archigram, Ant Farm, Eventstructure Research Group, thus for artist the world over such as Graham Stevens or Panamarenko, architects (Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Antoine Stinco, Hans Walter Muller, Johanne et Gernot Nalbach or Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth). But it was through a a few mythical exhibitions that the inflatable would find an international echo and a public image, notably the exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne of the City of Paris in 1968, and the pavilions of the Universal Exhibition in Osaka in 1970 (of which those of Yutaka Murata) and finally Documenta V in 1972 in Kassel where artists and architects such as Christo, Hans Hollein, Haus-Rucker-Co, Coop Himmelb(l)au take over public spaces with their works.
Henceforth, the inflatable, takes the form of furniture, dwellings, structures. The plastic polymers became more common and opened an extraordinary blossoming of creations, of forms and of colours. Furniture by Bernard Quentin, A.J.S. Aérolande, Quasar, De Pas, Urbino and Lomazzi, would accompany the pop art imagery and that of a “lucidity” of decorations and uses.
The ecological debate would soon take hold of the subject, for if at that time we were not yet wary of plastic and of other derivatives of petrol, inflatable architecture on the contrary appeared to be an “architecture of the air “, removing itself from the definitive and irreversible entry into time and space, escaping foundations and heavy materials. In England for example, the artist Graham Stevens worked on giving an ecological dimension to the use of pneumatic structures.
It also acquired a critical and political function. The ephemeral nature of the inflatable does indeed give it an intemporal dimension, that of the event, of the action, of participation. It is the instrument of an intervention, which did not escape artists such as those of the Gruppo N, or Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Hans Haacke, Otto Piene, Marinus Boezem, Lars Englund, Andy Warhol… and the architects who would make it the instrument of an alternative criticism like UFO, Utopia or the creators of the Viennese radical scene. Harbingers of the contestation which rumbled amongst the young generation, the inflatables act as a prism for viewing the world which surrounds us in another way (like the Urboeffimeri of UFO) and in order to live together differently (Instant City, Ibiza, 1971). The inflatable is thus used by the group A.J.S. Aérolande, made up of Jean Aubert, Jean-Paul Jungmannand Antoine Stinco, to call into question the competition the prix de Rome just before May ‘68 and to propose a new way of building, modular, festive and endlessly transformable.
After the petrol crisis at the end of the 1970’s which would sound the death knell of an ideology of the use of plastics, the inflatable progressively faded away, the post-modern current jeopardising the image of this industrial product. But since about ten years, with the appearance of more ecological new technologies, the inflatable has regained its reputation and represents an alternative for a number of architects (Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Nicholas Grimshaw, Arata Isozaki, Herzog & de Meuron, Snøhetta…). The inflatable enables the reinvention of spatial possibilities, introducing different perceptive and cognitive experiences. The recent appearance of organic textiles allows us to foresee the development of research where the inflatable could offer new architectural and design options and introduce new constructive principles, which the experiences of Achim Menges, amid.cero9, Kengo Kuma, Mad Architects Zero, Selgascano demonstrate…
Bernard Quentin’s story about inflatable furniture
Bernard Quentin’s research on pneumatic structures led him to become the first designer to design fully inflatable seats without structures in the early 1960s. He began to develop from 1966 the principle of “Molecul’Air”, inflatable structures made up with the agglomeration of spheres in the manner of a grouping of atoms.