proxy pétillant
Julie Béna according to Wong Binghao
“Béna strategically deploys the jester as a double, an avatar, a deceptively light-hearted substitute through which she critically comments on social and political issues. The jester’s jokes, playfulness, and humour are tactical proxies through which Béna sublimates urgent and serious topics including, but not limited to, gender and sexual politics, socio-cultural hierarchies, precarious labour, and the insidiousness of cultural commodification. […] Digitality allows Béna to represent bodies and worldviews that do not yet exist within comprehensible and narrow categories. Ascending in an elevator with the jester, the Groom muses about existential questions: ‘Does the existence square with the prior understanding of the subject? Have you stretched your existence enough to help you solve your problem?’ These esoteric questions shore up Béna’s fruitful use of digital technology as an artistic medium to expand the registers of visual representation to include non-normative subjects.”
Read more on TextWork.
Giving Space, Sculpting Time
Guillaume Leblon according to Saul Anton
“In a recent exhibition in Mexico City’s LABOR gallery, Leblon continued his longstanding engagement with architecture, but in a slightly more surreptitious and subtle manner that underscores the need to look at and read his works very carefully. The title of the show, AEROSOL, invokes an elusive shapelessness, something airy, gauzy, there and not there, something entirely antithetical to sculpture with a capital S and the built environment. […] Nevertheless, Leblon departs in significant ways from the discourse of the expanded field defined, in Krauss’s terms, as the space of ‘pure negativity.’ Above all, he remains closely engaged with the figure and the scale of the human body which operates as a constant point of reference in his work.”
Read more on TextWork.
Upcoming essays:
Jean-Charles de Quillacq according to Sylvie Fortin
Martine Aballéa according to Chus Martínez
Anne Bourse according to Iheanyi Onwuegbucha
TextWork fosters and supports the work of artists active in the French art scene through the publication of long-form critical essays produced by international writers. With this program, the Ricard Foundation reinforces its commitment of over 20 years to supporting and disseminating this art scene. TextWork is initiated in partnership with the French Ministry of Culture.
For more information: textwork@fondation-entreprise-ricard.com
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