Six artists, a gender-balanced selection, examine our relationship to the contemporary world.
Six artists, a gender-balanced selection, examine our relationship to the contemporary world. Maxime Parodi, in focus on our stand, draws moments of life and film stills lodged in his memory. Caroline Rivalan reinvents female myths in collage drawings. Anne-Laure Wuillai unfolds her bestiary of swimming pools in perfect forms. Benoît Barbagli Vautier exhibits his drawings, the common thread of a polymorphous practice. Gérald Panighi combines drawings and cynical aphorisms on humanity, and Jeanne Susplugas exhibits her intimate notebooks exploring confinement. MAXIME PARODI - FOCUS A graduate of the École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence in 2012, Maxime Parodi draws moments of life, film stills, masterpieces of classical painting, screenshots, seemingly very mundane moments, lodged in his memory. He slips discreetly into them in order to experience them better from within, without disturbing or upsetting anything; moreover, the figures present, often very numerous, pay him no attention. Silent, absent, posing, are they alive? Or merely memories? Some, entirely naked, stare at us fixedly; their nudity is in no way provocative, it amplifies the transparent, neutral, invisible aspect. Ghosts! Witnesses to the life they traverse, and which Maxime Parodi invites us to share. CAROLINE RIVALAN A graduate of the Villa Arson in Nice in 2011, she explores female myths and the tension between nature and artifice, between enchantment and domination. Drawing on archival images, she reassembles them plastically through the prism of montage, diverting them in order to reinvent them better. Diorama-like microcosms and luminous macrocosms layer different registers, creating a phantasmagorical universe. The feminine, omnipresent, becomes at once subject and act of subversion. Her work questions madness and the instrumentalisation of the female body and, through a play of shifts and recompositions, calls into question the way representations shape our power relations. The image, from then on, no longer surrenders itself as a passive object; it becomes a shifting entity, capable of reversing gazes and bending narratives, confronting the public with its own reflection. GÉRALD PANIGHI From Gérald Panighi’s practice, we keep in mind these drawings in large “raisin” format, in which the artist transfers, at their centre and by means of tracing paper, fragments of illustrations drawn from popular culture and the mass media. Faced with this partly identifiable vocabulary, the artist refrains from applying his own touch and deliberately limits his intervention to stylistic effects: redundancy, reversal, reframing, opposition, superimposition. The drawing levitates, in silence, circumscribed within the empty space, stained by the intimate; the artist’s presence creeps in through spots and smudges, whether intentional or not. They are due to the media used, residues of wet paint, the grease of graphite pencil accumulated on the side of the hand during the transfer…
