Opening on 8 February 2018, 6pm-10pm
09.02—25.03.2018
Opening Friday to Sunday from 2pm to 7pm or appointment
Arnaud Deschin galerie
18 rue des Cascades 75020 Paris
rdv@arnauddeschingalerie.com
+33 (0)6 75 67 20 96
With the support of the CNAP, Centre national des arts plastiques, for galleries/first exhibitions
Rémy Brière lives and works Paris.
His work is currently being exhibited at the Arnaud Deschin galerie in the solo show "Elvis Kisses" which has the support of the CNAP, Centre national des arts plastiques, for galleries/first exhibitions (until 25 March 2018), as well as at La Maison des Arts in Créteil, as part of the group show Inspiration-transpiration organized by the Syndicat Magnifique (until 17 February 2018).
After graduating from the Ecole Supérieure d'Art in Clermont in 2010, he had his first solo show in 2011 at Qasba, in Brescia, Italy, and in L'Espace d'En Bas, in Paris. In 2012, he organized the exhibition Un bégonia vaut mieux que deux tu l'auras, at De La Charge, in Brussels.
He has taken part in several group exhibitions curated in particular by Camille Azaïs, Axelle Blanc, Marc Geneix and Joel Riff.
His work was shown at the Biennale de Mulhouse in 2012, at the Salon Jeune Création in 2013, at the FIAC 2014 and at the Salon de Montrouge in 2016, and nominated at the Révélations Emerige in 2018.
Elvis Kisses by Rémy Brière at the Arnaud Deschin Galerie
Rémy Brière is an artist and set designer. It goes without saying that the dialogic relation between art and advertising is ambiguous and points a finger at a certain collective passiveness… A question thus immediately slips between the visual harmony of his installations and their narratives: are we on the right side of stage simulacra used to demythologize the history of representation?
At first glance, the works seem related to Arte Povera: the refusal of any assigned identity, the enhancement of processes which link humble and sophisticated materials, and natural and cultural materials… but in a reading made at a distance which uses the notion of imagery.
Are all these categories really involved?
No. Rémy Brière answers me with a disarming sensibility and straightforwardness. He prefers his two activities to be separated. They have nothing to do with each other. He tells me about his passion for clear lines, and the bendings of metals which “sketch narratives, while summoning Mannerism”. He seeks shifts of reference that are “hard to assume”: Elvis, for example, a fetish? Just as much as a “commonplace”! It is precisely this confusion which interests him. He does not want to have to clash with a Conceptual art conceived as an “erudite art”, his work is rather a “gymnastics of thought”, whose expansions reverse procedures.
His praxis is above all process-related: making containers, insulating, getting the object to disappear, keeping just a silhouette of it, giving himself over to “primary gestures”. A brass rod? A flower? A diamond? A water-melon? What is an “immutable relation”? One which permits a “porousness” to withstand a “gridding of references”… one which brings about a “gestation” in the very place of its “standstill”.
What is more, he grants an equally large legitimacy to pleasure time as to the time of conceptualization: what are the time-frames involved in a praxis? It is above all not a question of effectiveness, but of bodies which vibrate in their relation to “space”, a space to be understood as the site of a “doubt”. Because what is involved first and foremost is relations of distance which will “never be topical”, always pre-dated, indefinable, “but without any obscurantism”: just open signs.
For Elvis Kisses, he defines “a playground within a playground”, with fitted carpet and coloured sand, then he places an extinguisher in it, whose erased instructions make way for a poem. Further on, on a passé-partout, he draws a lively line in pencil then tries to find it in his studio with a snake beneath his lens. It is up to the snake to adopt the pose, precisely where a classical logic would have followed the reverse relation, which is to say the movement of a snake and its reproduction. Further on still, a score engraved on a piece of House, Artists with attitudes. An “attitude”? A false friend for Anglicists. The translation problem interests him: no, it is not a question of “pettiness”, just of “dance”.
When the artistic climate prompts us to think of each form in terms of media visuality, Rémy Brière, positioned in the eye of the hurricane, only vibrates in terms of processes, experiences of times and spaces. He thus bad-mouths the political challenge of the contemporary way of looking at things: that of a positioning with regard to the image. In the manner of a spontaneous game which, in the face of everything, disconcerts perception and delivers a metaphorical reality.
Text, Lucille Uhlrich