Jorge Satorre
The Indirect Gaze
26 June – 29 August 2010
Place des Quatre z’horloges
F 44 600 Saint-Nazaire, France
Opening hours:
Every day, except Mondays
from 11am to 7pm
Free Entry
After being developed during his tenure as an editorial illustrator, Jorge Satorre’s work recuperates and perverts the methods proper to that field, wherein the tacit relationships established between creator, story, image and reader/viewer serve as a point of departure for relating to and intervening in the places where his work develops.
Jorge Satorre’s way of working, rooted in an evident enjoyment of narrative, comes from historical and oneiric inquiry, detective work and poetic rereading. The artist lays claim to the freshness of the experimental, foregrounding the research process and effort that it involves. His usual modes of presentation (drawings, videos, performances) work by suggestion: tools for recovering a memory rather than faithful documents that would allow an event or the history of a place to be retraced. They function as subjective attempts at interpretation and which afford a kind of work that exists based more in the possibilities of oral communication than in its visual elements.
His drawings and films are thus considered as hybrid receptacles, emotionally very highly charged, weighing up the phenomena of migration (of populations, of objects) and mutation (functional and symbolic) that regulate our world.
In Saint-Nazaire Jorge Satorre will renew with his 2010 residence and exhibit a particular group of works closely tied to the geographical context and the relationship between the port and its past.
An astronomical method for detecting planets beyond the solar system called “the indirect gaze” provides the title of the exhibition, as well as of one of the included pieces. Since such planets are so far from Earth, they could until very recently only be discovered by studying the subtle variations in luminosity of stars oscillating nearby. Satorre uses this reference to explain the ways he has approached situations in which he has had to interpret a place totally unknown to him.
The exhibition includes a review of some of the artist’s most relevant work, as well as the continuation of a work in progress and two new projects. One of them, La part maudite illustrée functions as the axis of the group of work presented. Following a period of research in the city’s archives, he gathered information with which he created a personal inventory of the ships constructed in St Nazaire and that have now disappeared. Based on this documentation, a scientific illustrator painted each of these ships in detail, describing the moment at and way in which they disappeared. These images were then used in an illustrated reprint of Georges Bataille’s book La part maudite (The accursed share) that was proposed by the artist. This process was detained just before printing, based on the idea of a book that remains only as potential. The offset plates, together with the paintings, constitute the final presentation of the piece.
Jorge Satorre, Mexico City, 1979. He lives in Mexico and Amsterdam. His work has been presented in individual shows at: Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria (2010); galería Xippas, Paris (2008); Process Room / Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2007) and La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2006). He is currently completing a residency at Gasworks, London (project with Erick Beltrán for FormContent in September).
LE GRAND CAFÉ, Centre d’art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire (F)
Place des Quatre z’horloges, 44 600 Saint-Nazaire – France
T + 33 (0)2 44 73 44 00 – F + 33 (0)2 44 73 44 01
grand_cafe@mairie-saintnazaire.fr
www.grandcafe-saintnazaire.fr
