Paru le 21/11/2018 | Broché 127 pages
Tout public
translation Lucy Pons
Orlan before Orlan
For the first time, Orlan's paintings, serigraphs and collages series are compiled in a catalog on the occasion of an unprecedented exhibition. These works she made when she was young are very different from her current work, and they remind us that Orlan's work also began with painting.
[...] One might also be tempted to see in these pictures' assemblages of geometrical shapes the inside of La Mettrie's fleshless « body-machine », re-examined through the lens of Picabia's mechanisms and Duchamp's solitary machines. Supports/Surfaces may have played a part in providing Orlan with an argument to recuse the primacy they were given as an avant-garde in the art world. She contrasted their free, creased, and floating canvases with hard, industrial, non-« artistic » supports devoid of any of the intrinsic denotations, connotations and significations that the canvas usually carries, thus enhancing the brilliance of the enameled color and the increased reification of object-paintings which can therefore almost be categorized as sculptures. In this case, a backing is added to the painting. The paint becomes more than the stain that Benjamin described it as. I might also add that each of these paintings, like some of Duchamp's works, includes a system of levels and networks in its areas of flat color, so much so that it is not the painting of its time that comes to mind, but rather of the yet-to-come works of Peter Halley.
Léa Chauvel-Lévy studied political and moral philosophy at the Sorbonne and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She is an art critic, independent curator, art director and editor. She directed the LVMH Métiers d'Art residency program and was the supervising curator for the A PPR OC HE photography show and Paris Gallery Weekend 2018 at the Galerie Papillon. She was part of the selection committee for the 63rd and 64th editions of the Salon de Montrouge, and works as a member of the art committee for recto/verso sales at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. She has written pieces for several galleries (Filles du Calvaire, Galerie Vallois, Christian Berst...), as well as prefaces for catalogs and artist interviews -Johan Creten, Éditions Perrotin).
Eli Hill is a writer and curator based in New York. In 2017, they established The Glimmering Wing, an expanding library of haptic artist books. They have written for publications such as Artsy, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.
Bernard Ceysson is an art historian, and the former curator of the Saint-Étienne Museum of Modern Art and the former director of Saint-Étienne museums.
