Azimuth ~ Galerie Eva Vautier

AZIMUTH

Benoît Barbagli, Tom Barbagli, Evan Bourgeau

Camille Franch-Guerra, Omar Rodriguez Sanmartin

Florent Testa, Anne-Laure Wuillai

Opening on Friday, April 12th from 6pm

Exhibition from April 13 to June 28, 2019

With the participation of

Célia Vanhoutte, energy scenography

Frédéric Blancart, exhibition curator

“Who dragged us here? I curse him!”

This phrase came up often with these variations:

“My hands are frozen!”, “I fell in a hole again!”, “This is not the right way”.

Sometimes the valley silenced the grunts, at other times it gave them a powerful echo. At 2500 meters of altitude, in the Mercantour mountains, the crossing from Trécolpas to the Cougourde refuge was much more difficult than we had imagined. First of all, because the first price snowshoes on slopes don’t work. You lose your balance, you fall on your side and then good luck getting up again. […]

It took courage to embark on this adventure, to leave our workshops and think that we were going to make pieces up there, “in communion with nature”, as they said!

And in the last few yards of the day, the hardest of all, there was still that phrase, “But why are we doing this?”

Yes, why? We try to explain: We have to create works for an exhibition on April 12, 2019 at the Eva Vautier Gallery.

A few weeks earlier, the title had been decided: “Azimuth”. Between Exodus, Exotopia, Azimuth all azimuths, “Azimuth” had triumphed.”

Excerpt, All Azimuth, chapter I, 2019.

The Eva Vautier Gallery and the artists Benoît Barbagli, Tom Barbagli, Evan Bourgeau, Camille Franch-Guerra, Omar Rodriguez Sanmartin, Florent Testa, Anne-Laure Wuillai, accompanied by the curator Frédéric Blancart*, and an energetic scenography proposed by Célia Vanhoutte, present the exhibition Azimuth.
Originally, path or direction, the term “azimuth” in topography refers to the horizontal angle established from the direction of north, to that of a point on the horizon.

Between daily peri-urban crossings, desires for wild escapades and artistic protocols, the Azimuth exhibition begins with a collective approach.

Not far from a performative process, the eight friends gather for an inaugural excursion to Mount Cima, with each one’s doorstep as a starting point. The walk or the course of the streets, alleys, paths, then trails, reaches the highest point, the most distant, that the consent eight bodies in agreement, to nine days of the winter solstice.

In a second ascent, the curator Frédéric Blancart joins the artists, to isolate themselves together in a high mountain refuge, after a tumultuous journey through snowy peaks, scree and frozen lake. At more than 2000 meters of altitude, the snow, as a mark of each one, becomes an ephemeral sculpture: pits or mounds, lines in hollow or in relief, wakes of different directions and converging in the same azimuth.

Far from being limited to these two expeditions, the process continues and announces other explorations and quests for new lands and seas.

If the march is a pretext for gathering, each one conceives it in his own way, revealing each individuality as interdependent of the others. Some perforate, collect and archive, others care, cultivate and assemble.

The walks undertaken for the exhibition, like escapes, liberating from common constraints, reveal as a primacy, animalities and buried fantasies, sometimes lyrical flights of a body to body with nature.

Sketching the contours of a traveled territory, the exhibition calls for a stroll through installations, sculptures, drawings, photographs and videos. The works retrace the multiplicity of journeys: steep paths or paved roads, rocky ascents or sea dives, introspective or collective journeys.

Celia Vanhoutte, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, accompanies the artists from the first steps to the composition of the exhibition. Focusing on the elements and their materials, she elaborates an energetic scenography that draws, under an a priori arbitrary path, complementarities and tensions between the works.

The curator Frédéric Blancart and the poet Tristan Blumel, among other guests, punctuate the exhibition with different events, always in a game of resonance and displacement.

The exhibition Azimuth, both one and multiple, reveals a collective proposal, generated by the intersection of eight singular perspectives.

–

The Azimuth exhibition is part of the regional exhibition Des marches,Démarches, coordinated by the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, associated with the Centre d’Art de Digne-les-Bains, the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux and the Laboratoire de Grenoble.
Through exhibitions, installations, performances and events, organized during the year 2019, the cultural actors of the territory, unite around a common dynamic. Des marches,Démarches, based on an artistic proposal by Guillaume Monsaingeon, encourages movement as an artistic practice: walking, running, climbing, pedaling, swimming, according to rhythms that can go as far as motionless silence, traveling through territories that can be interior, steep, bucolic, urban… Des marches,Démarches, explores the incredible richness of movement on a human scale.

_______

Frédéric Blancart benefited from the ACROSS curatorial residency at thankyouforcoming, during which he met the artists Camille

France-Guerra and Evan Bourgeau*.