Vis-à-Vis des genres

Grzegorz Pawlak

Grzegorz Pawlak — Mon, 26 May 2008 19:31:38 +0000

Grzegorz Pawlak prepares a thesis in Fine Arts at the Picardie Jules Verne University. He lives and works in Amiens. His artistic approach is oriented towards the interrogation of an underlying poetic dimension in everyday life, throughout small glance shifts he gathers in short films.
Reconstituting frames and sounds from the ordinary aspects of objects and moments allows him to put in question our ability of giving names to the visible, also as to elude mechanisms of recognition carried on by our cultural inheritance.
It appears today that equipments and devices incorporating recent technologies quickly become integrated in our behaviour patterns, while they sometimes alter them, even more in the artistic domain. Grzegorz Pawlak undertakes to put in light these manifestations through widening the bristling abundance of the mundane towards the imagination of each individual.

Untitled

3 min video

2006

Thomas Girard

Grzegorz Pawlak — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:14:05 +0000

Thomas Girard is a graduate of a master’s degree in Fine Arts as well as in Art History, and lives in Beauvais. He has been working for a few years around the theme of still life, and even more precisely about the representation of objects troughout painting in the cycle Lorem Ipsum he started in 2003.
Refusing to give any allegorical or symbolic aspect to his still life paintings, he attempts to question his subject and understand the relationship one can have towards things, objects and products ; those human creations often neglected even though they haunt our everyday life.
Having a clearly visible attraction for messiness, Thomas Girard tries to bring us to see and especially feel those common objects he shows for themselves, rather than in a decorative purpose.

Lorem Ipsum n°5

Acrylic and oil painting

80 x 100cm

2006

Margot Burident

Grzegorz Pawlak — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:18:56 +0000

Margot Burident prepares a thesis in Fine Arts and a master’s degree in Art History at the Picardie Jules Verne University. She lives and works in Amiens.
This young woman puts in question the notion of autoportrait as well in painting as in photography. Her research gathers around the tradition and the mutation of the autoportrait in a contemporary perspective. It remains a far-reaching interrogation ensnaring our occidental inheritance of the pictures of “genre”, and the technical alterations brought by most of the digital artforms.

The cycle of paintings she initiated in 2003 brings out a face to face with the viewer, where the stare of painted faces tries to disorientate the spectator. Margot Burident’s approach can be situated in this avoiding of a narrative representation, beside her desire of getting rid of a personal metaphorical symbolism in order to only leave a figure yelling its simplicity of painted human being.
In an other registry, the photographs proposed by this artist turn away from those fixed paintings in favour of a fugitive mise-en-scene, where a haunting character appears, taking hold of a room, a wall, a cupboard… Still fleeing from narrative purposes, the individual moves around and adapts to the locations, playing with the shapes and textures.

This artistic development could seem paradoxical due to the differences between photography and painting, however, that’s where the process brings over some interesting variations, still with this interrogation of the idea of artistic genre, which can be related to how we us different artistic media.

Papier peint

Photography

30 x 40 cm

2005

Olivier Delporte

Grzegorz Pawlak — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:46:23 +0000

Olivier Delporte’s work can be basically conceptualized thanks to two media wich will finally gather into one through the devices he uses. The first media is video, and the second one is performance, through both of them the body shall become an artistic instrument in a defined area, becoming a portion of a digital space.
He intends to develop corporeal situations and to transform them thanks to video processing, in order to put forward a description, a rambling material being in a direct relationship with our society.
Olivier Delporte refuses to raise a narrative background, the video performance is devised close to a choregraphical form, which restrains action and movement into frames.

La chute
Cycle of 7 video performances,
PAL, DV, HDV, mute, color, 21 min,
2006 -2007

About the exhibition

Grzegorz Pawlak — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:04:15 +0000

Trying to understand the current criteria used to rate artistic creation can lead us to a simple question (which implies much more than it seems at a first glance): Has contemporary art become classical?
Vis à vis des Genres is an exhibition that aims to highlight the process of conception of genres in today’s art.
Four young artists using different media will portray the question of how contemporary art may be categorized, and how we inherited the classification of “genres”, commonly related to André Félibien’s theories written in the 17th century.
It is fundamental to put in place an ideational dialogue rather than a simple depiction, the title Vis-à-vis des Genres includes itself both ideas of a face to face between genres and of an attitude towards the concept of genre (“vis-à-vis” can be translated in the two ways). Portraits, still lifes, landscapes, mythological and historical paintings were once classified one among another, some of them considered as lower genres.
Contemporary artists have to increasingly absorb the medias appearing simultaneously with technological progressions, though they remain linked to more traditional artistic practices. The young artists exhibiting here may be connected through their belonging to contemporary art, which may appear to develop into a new class of art or category.

The art pieces exhibited will be organized as a meeting between different ways of making and different artistic aims, with some oil paintings, photographs, installations and videos laid around in the Camille Claudel Hall. At the same time, a symposium will take place about the exhibition theme, in order to expand the number of paths brought by the exhibition.

Welcome !

Grzegorz Pawlak — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:56:37 +0000

Hello there,

Here you will find some news and posts about the creation of the exhibition Vis-à-vis des Genres, which will take place in Amiens (France) around the middle of november 2008. Other categories shall soon be added about the artists and their works, and about our artistic association called Tétrapilectomie…

See you soon.