VINGT Paris Magazine

Bonom takes art to the skies: can graffiti be legal?

 Text: Rooksana Hossenally. Images: various.

No one really knows this mysterious chimpanzee who swings from building to building, spray cans and rollers at the ready. Like all superheroes, the artist who goes by the name of ‘Bonom’, wears a mask and never reveals his real identity. Scouring the city for large wall spaces, he prefers to work at night within the city’s shadows. One of Paris’ most respected 'clandestine' artists, Bonom is also one of the most prolific.

You may have seen his monumental works of intricate animal skeletons and other  creatures floating close to the sky  on the non-descript grey façades of various buildings. His works are dashed with an eerie quality making them instantly recognisable. Most are found in the 11th district of Paris; if you look up at number 123, rue Vielle du Temple in the Marais, you will see his enormous, somewhat gory, boar on a spit (pictured above). For his minotaur you’ll have to go to rue de la Traversière towards Ledru Rollin. As for the myriad fish bones and other animal figures, we won’t spoil the surprise; they will without doubt jump out at you from hidden corners when you least expect it. The artist is also very present in Brussels and Luxembourg but little else is know about him. Footage filmed by a Belgian television channel, shows him at work on a ten storey building - the scale of the piece alone makes it one of the most impressive of his works. In addition to his artistic skill, he is also nifty at climbing and abseiling, enabling him to reach the most difficult spots well away from City Hall's cleaning squads.

Maison Rouge: Home is Where the Art Is

Text: Aran Cravey

With over a hundred museums, Paris is the undisputed capital of artistic institutions. And while it can boast more than it's fair share of publicly funded, pillars of art history, it's contemporary art funding lags far behind it's foreign competitors. Which is why entrepreneur and contemporary art enthusiast, Antoine de Galbert has taken it upon himself to build his a foundation dedicated to not only the exhibition and funding of living artists, but to the dialogue between creative minds from various nations, genres and political points of view. As a professional dealer and private collector, de Galbert understood the complexities of the contemporary art world and saw a need for a galvanizing force between its polarizing sectors.

In 2000, Maison Rouge was founded as a forum for creative discussion of all varieties of artistic creation. As a privately funded foundation, Maison Rouge has the freedom to encourage emerging artists and allow for experimentation in it's exhibition program. Dedicated to artistic collaborations and cultural exchange, Maison Rouge presents three distinctly different exhibitions this summer that provide a fresh perspective on the other.

Lining the walls of the inner gallery, Jean de Maximy's ink drawn frieze invites guests into a metaphysical morphic reality. Upon venturing further, viewers will discover other distant realms and one of the lesser explored aspects of founder Antoine de Galbert's collection. The 400 headdresses and ceremonial ornaments in this presentation served a practical purpose in the cultures from which they originated. The presence of these indigenous cultural artifacts in this contemporary artistic venue adds a global and historical juxtaposition to the space's modernity.

Soirees Nomades - July at the Fondation Cartier

Text: Aidan Mac Guill
Image: Rémi Vannier

As part of the Beat Takeshi Kitano exhibition 'Gosse de Peintre', the Fondation Cartier are offering a number of interesting cultural evenings in July under the title 'Soirees Nomades'.

Thursday July 1 sees  Aymeric Hainaux and Jérôme Game perform at the Departure Lounge. Hainaux, a French vocal artist also known for his graphic work, presents a vocal performance piece that “combines friction, heartbeats, beatbox, silence and dense sound.”  Expect to witness the human voice doing things you didn't think were possible. Jérôme Game is an associate professor of film studies and philosophy at the American University Paris, and has emerged in the past couple of years as an important young voice in the field of contemporary poetry. He is the recipient of a 'Mission Stendahl' genius grant given by the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, allowing him to travel to any country in the world to research a project. His style is described as using “superimposition and ellipsis to create effects of stammering, haste, and syncopation.” His reading of his own poetry will be accompanied by videos produced by Valérie Kempeneers.

France’s Young Artists: Alive and Kicking - Portes Ouvertes 2010 Beaux-Arts

Text and image of Beaux-Arts interior by Aran Cravey

From Delacroix and David, to Monet and Renoir, the list of great artists to emerge from the ateliers of Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts spans the length of the prestigious institution’s 350-year history.

Established under the reign of Louis XIV, the Académie de Beaux-Arts was created to train France’s young artists to become the best and brightest in all of Europe.  Over the next several hundred years it did just that, attracting the world’s most gifted creative minds with its classical training and rigorous curriculum.

However, since the latter half of the twentieth century, the art world has come to view Beaux-Arts, as well as Paris, for that matter, as nothing more than anachronisms, artistic dinosaurs concerned only with preserving the glory of their past. Judging from the work exhibited over the weekend at the École des Beaux-Arts’s student showcase, the Portes Ouvertes, France’s critics may need to reassess.

VINGT ART BY NIGHT May 25-30

Text: Aran Cravey
Image: Eric Yahnker, fingering spaghettio's

It looks as though the fair weather is here to stay, and Paris can finally revel in all its springtime glory. What better way to celebrate the slowly setting sun than to spend the late lit hours visiting this week’s crop of gallery openings.

Wander the narrow streets of St. Germain de Près and see the host of new exhibitions, starting with Thursday’s Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois representation of Gilles Barbier, an artist known for his macabre humor and satirical stance (think Robert Gober meets Marcel Duchamp), to Galerie Loevenbruck’s collective exhibition, “Comment l'esprit vient à la matière PART # 1 Métaphysique chimie” curated by Stéphane Corréard on Saturday.

Across the river, Galerie Magda Danysz presents Seen. Banksy admirers should check out the solo show, which features three series by the “Godfather of Graffiti Art,” whose career began on the streets of New York in 1973 and rose with the likes of 80’s art stars such as Keith Haring and Basquiat.

Head over to the Marais for a taste of today’s rising art stars and see Eric Yahnker’s “nervous surf” at Galerie Jeanroch Dard. The Los Angeles based artist presents ten drawings and several sculptures that play upon the widening gap of perception between European and American cultural ideologies represented through commercial images, such as in the work, fingering spaghettio's.

VINGT ART Openings May 10-16

Text: Aran Cravey
Image: Evariste Richer, ÉNERGIE CINÉTIQUE, 2005

Does any of it really matter? Are we even in the same state of matter? And what is matter, anyways?... Find out the answers to these questions and more, in this week’s picks of Paris gallery openings. Tuesday’s opening at Galerie Christophe Gaillard throws vernissage visitors right into the philosophical thick of it all with their presentation of Laurent Jaffrennou’s exhibition Tectus. Layering different shapes and textures, the Parisian born artist creates complex assemblages that play upon human perspectives of space and shadow in a deeper exploration of the fragility of existence.

Rineke Dijkstra at Marian Goodman Gallery

Text: Aran Cravey
Image: Rineke Dijkstra, Ruth Drawing Picasso

Adolescence isn’t pretty, at least mine wasn’t. Transitioning from childhood into young adulthood was, for me, an experience in awkward adjustments and unfortunate fashion choices. For Dutch artist, Rineke Dijkstra, however, the perilous uncertainty of life’s pubescent purgatory has provided an abundance of inspiration from which to create.

Renown for her strikingly honest portraits of  individuals in periods of transition, Dijkstra talent lies in her ability to reveal an intense intimacy with the subject, while capturing a stirring universality. The raw simplicity of her images heightens the profound sense of isolation and emotional vulnerability within the subject’s reality. In her 1992 series Beach Portraits, Dijkstra’s adolescent subjects stand facing the camera washed in a stark light that contrasts with the surrounding seashore landscape, creating a tension that seems to hang on the verge of transition, as if waiting for an impending storm.

VINGT pick of art openings this week

Text: Aran Cravey
Image: Polixeni Papapetrou, The Loners

Call it the Tim Burton effect, or maybe just Spring fever, but this week’s gallery openings have viewers hopping through the rabbit hole to parallel realities of the imagination. No doubt, Lewis Caroll would be proud. On Thursday, Galerie LMD presents Polixeni Papapetrou’s Between Worlds. In this photographic series, Australian born Papapetrou has created sumptuous, surreal landscapes in which children masked as animals take on the archetypal characters of adult reality. In their unsettling beauty, these hybridized fantasies capture a stirring tension between absurdity and truth that make for compelling images.

Wandering along similar boundaries of surreal consciousness, Galerie Anton Weller presents Nous Deux. The multi-media exhibition by the artistic collective ConiglioViola (at the time of the work composed of Fabrizio Coniglio and Andrea Raviola) is, in the artists’ words, “an autobiographical and sometimes melancholic fairy tale, an attempt to escape from time and from reality but also escape from Art.” In the eleven photographs plus music video, Coniglio and Raviola utilized digital modification in creating adolescent avatars of themselves that travel through dark realms of fantasy.

Continuing with the week’s artistic voyage, Saturday’s opening at Espace topographie de l´art for Dóra Maurer promises an “infinite, vast terrain” in which numerous realms of identity and personal liberation are explored.  This week, Gallery goers can travel to distant realms without ever leaving Paris!

VINGT pick of the art openings this week

Text Aran Cravey

Image: Will Cotton, Consuming Folly

With April’s hastening end and May Day fast approaching, Paris sees more of springtime’s long awaited pleasures, including this week’s gallery exhibition openings. Galerie Albert Benamou starts the week out on a revelatory note with today's vernissage for Rêves Party. Comprised of works by artists, Nadine Blandiche, Hervé Ic, Marc Molk, Emile Morel, Florence Obrecht, Franck Rezzak, “Rêves Party” promises to present a journey into a multimedia dreamscape, though with a less than sweet taste of humanity’s imagination.

Galerie Daniel Templon serves up a similar dose of salty and sweet with their simultaneous exhibitions by Will Cotton and Loïc Le Groumellec. A native of Brittany, Le Groumellec creates work that often reflects the somber tone of his region’s mythic past. His minimalist paintings, with their commanding, shadowy presence create the perfect foil for the sugary sweet visions of Will Cotton. Confectioned covered, female nudes lounge seductively over ethereal tuffs of gossamer candy in Cotton’s paintings, bringing to mind both the Rocco (Fragonard and Boucher) and the contemporary  (Currin and Yuskavage). Both artists explore worlds of fantastical realities, with glimpses into the soul that delve beyond the surface.

The Promises of the Past at Centre Pompidou

Text: Joanna Bronowicka
Image: Goranka Matic

The exhibition Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art on Former Eastern Europe, on display at Centre Pompidou until July 19, 2010, appears to be born out of the curators’ fear that art created in last decades in former communist countries is bound to be misunderstood, unless they make serious effort to explain it. Do not forget your glasses - you will spend most of the time reading painfully academic descriptions that will obscure any emancipating effect that the artists intended. Forget about making your own aesthetic judgments - all acceptable interpretations have been carefully pre-packaged for you in the form of succinct subtitles, such as Fantasies of Totality, Feminine-Feminist or, my personal favorite, Micro-Political Gesture and the Critique of the Institution.

The zigzag design of the exhibition by a Polish artist Monika Sosnowska suggests not only the discontinuity of Eastern European history, but also the unstable relationship between the participating artists and the social-realism endorsed by the Communist governments. While contesting the modernist canons, these artists have never abandoned the underlying idea that art is a way of transforming society. Unfortunately, when art meets politics, aesthetic pleasure often yields to intellectual utility. Even when something strikes you as politically innocent, like in the case of Ion Grigorescu boxing his double, the description is there to remind you that it represents schizophrenia caused by communist dictatorship.