Between the Lines: Group exhibition

With a selection of artworks from:

Valerio ADAMI / Strauss BOURQUE-LAFRANCE / Daniel BUREN / Claude CLOSKY / Claudia COMTE / Carlos CRUZ-DIEZ / Jérémie GINDRE / Hans HARTUNG / Sol LEWITT / Kleber MATHEUS / Giulo PAOLINI / Dan REES / Georgia RUSSELL

Samuel Le Paire Fine Art presents “Between the Lines”, an exhibition featuring a group of international artists from different positions in the development of contemporary art, articulating an preoccupation with the process of transition between semantic or physical lines, or namely the intermediate space of art between consciousness and form. Thinking from the vantage point of the fragmented self, a by-product of the increasing abstraction of late capitalism, representational images are not stable enough to provide an adequate foundation for the production of social subjectivities. New grammars emerge from the artists’ investigations into how structures of time become embodies in images after the end of coincidence between thought and representation.

The line, the most elementary unit of duration and continuity, becomes for us also a field of contiguity and parallelism. From the red and black markings of the legend Sol LeWitt over a postcard of Boticelli (1980),we begin to experience receding lines that break and superimpose, containing different semantic orders that by no means overlap: Meaning and form are both independent and contingent. The history of the line, a denizen of the 20^th century, sets off with a process of internal decentralization that began with abstract painters and it blurred the possibilities of what is it possible to call both memory and consciousness in the image. But on the receiving end, for us, the line was liberated from embodiment and it became an autonomous force.

In a recent sculptural work by Strauss Bourque-Lafrance, we can observe how the field between basic units and formal content has been leveled and acquired a singular seamlessness; artists begin to operate in an asymmetrical reality which does not admit of a correlation between object and idea. Artists such as Georgia Russell and Jérémie Gindre, invite us to look at the real as disfigured object which requires an inverse gaze, or at least the repositioning of the Cartesian plan into a new set of contiguous complexities that cannot be accounted for without adopting different points of view at the same time. To observe between the lines, is not without risk, and never without tension: Tiptoeing along a fault line involves re-drawing a path, or imagining it trailblazing.

Daniel Buren’s iconic work from the late 1970s, represents an entire generation of artists concerned with the dualism between line and object, and strikes us today in its deceiving simplicity, looking already into the color field. Valerio Adami’s acrylic on canvas from the same generation, with its musical innuendos brings to life a conversation between the senses, reimagining the architecture of reality into fragments that in turn reveal autonomous presences and real beings. A Brazilian artist, Kleber Matheus, synchronizes the energy of the line into a chaotic form that grows in no specific direction. The artists in the exhibition are working across media and eras, redrawing the consciousness of art in more complex space where relationships between objects are real sites of both continuity and conflict.

In between is a space of ambiguity, without a shape solid enough to contain the liquid structures we live in today; disappearance and effacement are also technical processes and forms of drawing, as in the work of Dan Rees and Guilo Paolini. Inside the space of juxtaposition that lies between the concreteness of traditional lines and the semantic distance between these two subjects, we thread barefoot attempting to make sense of a world that is now strange. It might be strange, but it is also liberating. We have now the power to name things –like gods, to bring them into being, to conjure them up. To be in between is to situate ourselves in time, to navigate its deep terror, and to essentially create existence out of nothingness, to create, but then also to destroy, to abstract, to repeat and imagine again.

Arie Amaya-Akkermans, Art critic