Farah Atassi

Farah Atassi

Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre

Farah Atassi, Ornamental Folding, 2014. Oil and glycero on canvas. Courtesy Xippas Gallery, Paris.

October 8, 2014

Farah Atassi
11 October 2014–4 January 2015

Preview: 10 October, 6:30pm

Le Grand Café, Contemporary Art Centre, Saint-Nazaire
Place des Quatre z’horloges
44 600 Saint-Nazaire
France
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 2–7pm,
Wednesday 11am–7pm 
Free entry 

grand_cafe [​at​] mairie-saintnazaire.fr

www.grandcafe-saintnazaire.fr

The floating syntheses of space-time in Farah Atassi’s works describe autonomous worlds with a uniquely fascinating power. Initially influenced by the aesthetics of ruins, the artist began painting a series of deserted interiors from photos of Russian community housing and abandoned, derelict sites. Her work is conceptual, and remarkable in the way it restructures space: large volumes are often approached at an angle and oscillate between hyper-construction and dripping paint, scale is disconcertingly distorted, and the relationship between form and presence is rethought through a beautifully considered meditation on furniture.

The artist progressively focused her investigations on the celebration of modernist utopias in figurative compositions treated as scenic devices: out of this came the Workshop series, which multiplies references, citations and a mise en abyme of signs. While the nods in the direction of Léger, Malevich, Mondrian or Charles & Ray Eames confirm her preoccupation with geometry, they also translate her persistent will to bring together architecture and painting in a plan and elevation process already present in Malevich’s Architectones

In her most recent canvases, more complex and less narrative, she continues to consider space through an exploration of decorative motifs and architectural models. Her interest in the geometric motif (or the simple form) has led to a systematic use of the grid in the compositional process itself (Modern toys II, Space for objects), and then to a progressive opening up of the work to the question of ornamentation.

These new formal approaches are evident in the Tabou series, inspired by the aesthetic of Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen and confronting modernism—the pure line of the Bauhaus—with folk ornament. The artist seems to want to orchestrate coherence out of contradiction: false symmetry, misleading mirror effects, a decentred vanishing point, her recent canvases set up a presentation made up of fault lines, melding rigour and controlled accidents, a mental scene conceived for hybrid objects, dwarf factories, miniature apartment blocks or piles of toy houses.

In the lineage of artist precursors who introduced elements of applied arts, craft and folk art into modern art (Auguste Herbin, Marsden Hartlay, but also Matisse, who she has much studied) Farah Atassi also deploys some surprising motifs inspired by the East. Reproduced in a systematic manner on the entire surface of the canvas, without a central point, these forms sculpt, fold and unfold spaces like mysterious theatres of objects, between abstraction and figuration, flatness and marked illusionistic perspective (Theatre Objects, Sculptures in Maze).

The exhibition presented by Le Grand Café will give particular prominence to these most recent investigations, offering a comprehensive journey through the artist’s universe with a dozen canvases: a dozen cerebral micro-universes. 

In her work, Farah Atassi is calling into question stories of modernity in painting, its formal stakes and its relationship to reality and to fiction; in so doing, she is taking part in current art debate, confronted with the challenge to interpretations posed since the West discovered the existence of other realities and other modernities. At a time of post-colonial approaches, the artist’s activity nevertheless holds on to more formal and age-old concerns, with a particular treatment that rests on contrary associations: interiors and perspective, cubism and ornament. A remarkable way of producing hybridity in the service of utopian spaces, with shades of the metaphysical.

Curator: Sophie Legrandjacques, director of Le Grand Café – Contemporary Art Centre

Press contact: Alexandra Servel, servela [​at​] mairie-saintnazaire.fr / T + 33 2 44 73 44 05

Related event: Farah Atassi in conversation with Guillaume Désanges
Sunday 9 November, 3pm
At Le Grand Café, free entry

Farah Atassi at Le Grand Café, Contemporary 
Art Centre, Saint-Nazaire
Advertisement
RSVP
RSVP for Farah Atassi
Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre
October 8, 2014

Thank you for your RSVP.

Le Grand Café—Contemporary Art Centre will be in touch.

Subscribe

e-flux announcements are emailed press releases for art exhibitions from all over the world.

Agenda delivers news from galleries, art spaces, and publications, while Criticism publishes reviews of exhibitions and books.

Architecture announcements cover current architecture and design projects, symposia, exhibitions, and publications from all over the world.

Film announcements are newsletters about screenings, film festivals, and exhibitions of moving image.

Education announces academic employment opportunities, calls for applications, symposia, publications, exhibitions, and educational programs.

Sign up to receive information about events organized by e-flux at e-flux Screening Room, Bar Laika, or elsewhere.

I have read e-flux’s privacy policy and agree that e-flux may send me announcements to the email address entered above and that my data will be processed for this purpose in accordance with e-flux’s privacy policy*

Thank you for your interest in e-flux. Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.