With a selection of artworks by:
Jean COCTEAU / Wim DELVOYE / Marc DESGRANDCHAMPS / ERRO / Sam FRANCIS / Camille HENROT / MAN RAY / Jonas MEKAS / Martin PARR / Arnaldo POMODORO / PRIMITIVE ART (Tanzania) / Elisa SIGHICELLI / Luzia SIMONS / Alfred STEVENS / Cy TWOMBLY / Joana VASCONCELOS / Albert WATSON / Tom WESSELMANN / Sophie WHETTNALL
“It is easy to depict the forms of a body, more than the skin itself. As a surface. The skin seems to be a possible means for representation without being representable for as much. The skin, wrapping of the body appears like a surface with its singular texture, the variations in its colour, and like a group of fragments that espouse the various forms of the body. Giving the skin’s tones the richness of its nuances always seems impossible because the skin separates us from representation of the body at the moment when we feel its textures, visually and tactilely. Any depiction of the body is an instant suspended by the vision or touch of the granulated skin, as if the wrapping of the form was separating from the forms it exalts to become a surface with its own terrain. This is why skin presents itself first like a text that dispenses with metaphor and creating an image of the body. It hides nothing. It does not offer itself up to the gaze like a wrapping that encloses something and gives it shape. This idea of a “skin of the things” which should be burst to seize a sort of essence of the thing, persists like a philosophical tradition which puts skin in the place of appearance.” *
“Between the skin”, between the skin of the work; in, under, between, on the work’s body. Such is the question being treated in this new exhibition. “Between the skin”, a metaphor of the revelation of the work’s body. In the video King Kong addition by Camille HENROT, the superposition of three versions of King Kong thickens the skin of the film as far as melting the subjects through three separate times. ERRO, in his wish to leaf through History, plays with time and its dissociation to create some “between-skin”. MAN RAY uses sculpture cosmetics to hide the truth by “the between skin”. But how do body and skin disclose themselves in these works? HENROT takes up this idea of reading through the body in Metawolf by scraping the skin of characters on the film in order to re-form the body itself. The artists in this exhibition illuminate, thicken, dissolve, compress, lacerate, burn the skin to reveal its essence. The works of DESGRANDCHAMPS known for his “phantom liquids”, reveal this quintessence of the skin. It is worked within the material by ARMAN and POMODORO in order to allow us to glimpse what is beyond this skin, a theme that is always a creator of interpretation. The thickening of textures and the broad outline to reveal the beauty of the feminine body of WESSELMAN, or the photograph of an overturned banana skin, where SIMONS attempts to describe the texture of the flesh between the skin and the fruit, she emphasizes the skin in its simplest device and asks yet again the perpetual question of artists yesterday and today about this theme.
*Henri-Pierre Jeudy, le corps comme objet d’art, Armand Colin, Paris, 1998.
