Exhibition visible at the Eva Vautier Gallery from April 22, 2016

Mail Art: Starting from an important need to communicate with others, Ben decided in the 1960s to write postcards to institutions, other artists, and his friends. In these letters, theory, poetry, appropriations and megalomania are mixed. The artistic action consisted in keeping up a correspondence, a practice that gave rise to exchanges in which the total freedom of creation was proclaimed. In all cases, the playful side of Mail-Art is clearly perceptible: a colorful nod to the corresponding artists, the use of stamps and personal stamps “out of the ordinary”, the surprise for the final recipient to discover an extraordinary “letter”.

” Mail Art is important because without Mail Art there would never have been Dada, Surrealism or Fluxus. All these movements and others begin and pass through the communication often postal. We send and write ideas to each other.

And then there are those artists who almost only create through the Post Office and Mail Art, Ray Johnson, Jean Toche, Rene Duran, Orimoto, Prolix..“

Ben Vautier

Exhibition on the second floor, Ben’s guest : Patrick Lanneau

The encounter with Patrick Lanneau’s painting is a journey into color. Painter, draughtsman and video artist, he is acomplete artist. The stridehe colors, the schematization of the forms and the work of the pictorial matter evoke a dreamlike universe in weightlessness. Patrick Lanneau then devotes himself mainly to the landscape which becomes more and more evasive.