Antoine Renard: Pharmakon
October 9, 2021–February 6, 2022
26 quai Aspirant Herber
34200 Sète
France
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Jimmy Robert: Appui, tendu, renversé
Appui, tendu, renversé by Jimmy Robert (born 1975 in Saint Claude, Guadeloupe) is the first exhibition of this size dedicated to the artist in France. In seven rooms, Jimmy Robert’s exhibition offers a broad overview of the artist’s career since 2001, assembling a large collection of photographs, videos, sculptures, texts and works on paper. Jimmy Robert has been placing the identity and representation of the black body at the centre of his approach, more broadly exploring questions having to do with the desire, perspective and vulnerability of bodies, sometimes their absence.
It is often the body and voice of the artist himself that are presented, in installations mixing writing, poetry, dance, movement and images. Behind the masking, covering and disappearance games the artist plays, it is a veritable erotic of materials and surfaces that shows up everywhere. Fabric, leather, wood, the quality of papers used are all skins and tactile surfaces that summon the sense of touch and grab visual attention.
Curator: Marie Cozette
The exhibition Appui, tendu, renversé is the product of a partnership between three institutions: Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, Museion in Bolzano and the Crac Occitanie in Sète.
The first stage of the project was presented at Nottingham Contemporary from September 26, 2020 to April 18, 2021 (curated by Nicole Yip), and the second stage was shown at Museion in Bolzano from May 28 to August 29, 2021 (curated by Bart van der Heide and Frida Carazzato).
Antoine Renard: Pharmakon
The exhibition Pharmakon presents new works by Antoine Renard, created following his residency at the Villa Médicis in 2019. In Rome, he was able to conduct various researches into scent, conceived as a medium of memory, identity, and the psyche. Drawing from the cultural heritage of Rome and the Mediterranean, Antoine Renard based his work on ancient and Christian cultures that have a broad experience of scent in their relationship with mysticism, the body, and healing. This research in Italy was preceded by several trips to the Peruvian Amazon between 2018 and 2020, during which Antoine Renard studied various healing rituals practiced on adolescents and adults with severe addictions. In that context, he discovered the importance of scents in those therapies, especially for perfumeros, healers who develop olfactory healing practices.
For over ten years, Antoine Renard has been developing unique work in sculpture, installation and video, exploring what lies in the shadows, lurking in the recesses of the subconscious, where he deconstructs and closely examines the mechanics of fear and anxiety, which sometimes permeate our relationship to reality to the point of transgression. Although he uses the latest technologies and high-tech digital imagery, this is often in order to adulterate them, to twist the way they are used, to push error potential and machine deviance to the limit. For the exhibition at the Crac Occitanie, Antoine Renard developed a set of works conceived from raw material samplings and empirical observations conducted during his research. Subjected to technochemical processes, these materials have been reinterpreted and reformulated in the form of videos, sounds, sculptures and scents. Creating a porous environment, where chemical, digital and psychological elements meet, the artist opens avenues for dialogue between thought currents that are dear to him, such as veganism, mystical theology, structuralism, and scientific logic.
Curator: Marie Cozette
The exhibition Pharmakon was produced in partnership with the French Academy in Rome in the context of the
Occitanie-Médicis prize. Antoine Renard received assistance from the Cnap for his research (artistic project support).
The scents designed in the exhibition were created in collaboration with the Master of the École Supérieure du Parfum in Paris (Tonka class of 2022).
The Crac Occitanie
Located in Sète, on the bank of Canal Royal in the heart of the city, the Crac Occitanie overlooks the port and the Mediterranean Sea. Its architecture’s exceptional volumes reflect the industrial nature of the building, which was originally a refrigerated warehouse used for the conservation of fish. In 1997, architect Lorenzo Piqueras renovated the original building, giving it the current configuration and transforming it into an exceptional exhibition site, offering 1,200 square meters of gallery space distributed over two floors.
The Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain is managed by the Région Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée. It receives support from the Ministry of Culture and aid from the Occitanie region’s prefecture and DRAC.
