MUSEE PICASSO PARIS
Ouverture au public le 25 octobre 2014
Hôtel Salé - 5 rue de Thorigny - 75003 Paris
9h30-18h00
Du 23/10 au 31/10
Ciné-concert Deconstructing le 31/10 à 16 heures
La gratuité accordée aux visiteurs munis d'un billet YIA Fair le 25/10 et le 26/10
Ouverture officielle du Musée le 25/10
Projection des films Carlotta's way et Returning Carlotta's way de Laurent Fiévet.
Galerie Jeanroch Dard sur une proposition de Marie Gayet.
Carlotta’s Way makes use of superimposition to bring together a short extract of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo that has been greatly slowed down and reworked to play backward and forward with a series of details of Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas.
The piece is divided into fourteen chapters, each of which is devoted to a part of the painting that the passage from the film overlays in varying degrees of opacity, sometimes playing forward and sometimes backward. Putting the painting’s motifs into motion and redefining its texture, a series of complex and continually renewed interactions takes place between the filmic and pictorial elements
brought together in the piece. New readings of the works seem to propose themselves and certain elements proper to these are highlighted.
While the video’s title echoes that of a film by Brian de Palma, which proposes numerous responses to Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work, it most particularly introduces a reference to the character Carlotta Valdes, whose painted portrait – which is not without a certain number of correspondences to the representation of the menina Doña Isabel de Velasco, who stands to the right of the Infanta – plays a decisive role in Vertigo. Presiding over multiple connections between fictional and pictorial worlds to the point of generating an abundance of figurative and temporal superimpositions, it effectively invites both characters and viewers to take comparative approaches similar to those that the editing provokes through its combination of film and painting.
In line with the character’s status in Hitchcock’s film, this reference highlights the contaminating effects of Velasquez’s work on the aesthetic of Vertigo, the latter’s tendency to feed on the former’s substance, and even the film’s propensity to incarnate its different figures. In this sense, the reference summarizes the complex interactions at work in the video that point out the progression of our gaze in the principle of the analysis itself.
The 93 minute-long work can be exhibited independently or in combination with its counterpart, Returning Carlotta’s Way.
Returning Carlotta’s Way redoubles the proposition set forth by Carlotta’s Way. Likewise divided into fourteen chapters, the work lingers on another series of details from Las Meninas, associated with the same extract from Vertigo, which is once more reworked to play backward and forward in very slow motion. As such, the video offers a second progression within Velasquez’s composition,
isolating different motifs and arranging alternative portions of the image so as to create further complex interactions between the painting and Hitchcock’s film.
The retrograde succession of chapters (from 14 to 1) creates a sense of returning after Carlotta’s Way, (whose chapters run from I to XIV). The combination of these two works can thus form a loop over three hours in length, structurally reinforcing both the forward and backward playback that composes the pieces and the perspective that the videos can afford one another. Combined, they create a trap that encloses the pictorial and filmic characters despite the many movements that would liberate them.
Nevertheless, the durations of the two videos differ. While they make references to types of film formats (4/3 vs. VistaVision) and to the means of their diffusion (movie screen vs. television or DVD), the videos take on a voluntary asymmetry proper to the pictorial composition and to the structure of the film’s screenplay – a means of signaling the difficulty of any return in time and the
consideration of its many lessons.
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Rocking, Gabrielle Conilh de Beyssac.
Galerie Maubert
Exposition au sein du jardin du Musée Picasso
ROCKING, acier, 140 x 160 x 0,04 cm, 2014
Rocking is a simple geometric shape precisely drawn and cut into a few millimeters thick iron sheet. The shape is then curved balancing the form. A game of visible equivalences between solid and void, iron and space plays in the visitor’s eye. The sculpture's mass, that went from plan to volume, sits on its curved edges. In motion, the iron sheet rocks all along its own thickness. It draws on the ground the line of its own silhouette. It also draws its “track” of sound into space. We can hear the profound and subtile sound of the iron vibrating as it moves. Rocking does a wide movement into space keeping its balance on a thin line. On its way the piece goes from a horizontal to a vertical position and back . We can see it rock itself up, in a vertiginous motion, in an acrobatic dance.
« Artist Gabrielle Conilh de Beyssac has studied in the Paris fine arts school (2012), Emily Carr institute of art and design in Vancouver (2011) and the Villa Arson school in Nice (2007). She received the Paris fine arts school friends association’s price (Thaddaeus Ropac’s combined to Clermont Tonerre foundation’s price).
Gabrielle Conilh de Beyssac’s work is included and interdependent to the environment in which it takes place and comes to life. Pieces are physically experienced by the visitor.
Some sculptures draw their own shapes in space while others leave a potential mark in the visitor’s mind. For the artist, it is a way to underline the energetic power of motion. She explores the idea of potential lines, or actual tracks, that may be left by a form. » Léa Bismuth.!