ArtContest Window
20-04 > 08-07 2018
Galerie Rivoli
690 Chaussée de Waterloo
1180 Brussels
From 20 April to 80 July, the Galerie Rivoli presents artworks by Florian Kiniques and Léa Mayer in a collaboration between ArtContest and the CENTRALE for contemporary art.
Artistic Director for the CENTRALE Carine Fol explains:
“In response to Valérie Voucher’s invitation and as a starting point for a future collaboration between ArtContest and the CENTRALE for contemporary art, I recommended two artists whose work will be shown in the window of the Galerie Rivoli between 20 April to 15 July 2018.
Léa Mayer and Florian Kiniques are both currently taking part in Private choices, an exhibition at the CENTRALE focusing on the art collections of 11 Brussels-based contemporary art collectors. This choice further emphasizes the privileged relationship between collectors and emerging artists. The three collectors presenting these artists in the space made available by the CENTRALE are committed to collaborating with up-and-coming artists: Nicole and Olivier G. (Léa Mayer) and Christophe Veys (Florian Kiniques).
Mayer and Kiniques each exhibit two pieces in the window of the Galerie Rivoli in an ensemble articulating around the visible and the invisible, balance and unbalance, notions that take on a specific meaning in a shop-window: visible but inaccessible.
The installation Quatre cale-portes et trois sculptures, 2017, and the watercolour drawing representing banana skins Variations autour du thème de la peau de banane (2015) by Léa Mayer are emblematic of the artist’s process, which is developed around notions of perception, knowledge and imagination. Starting from a questioning on the influence of our education and history in understanding an object, artwork, discourse, landscape, space and time, the installation articulates around a very singular, individual process. Conversely to conceptual art that tends to substitute linguistic sign to aesthetic object, Mayer advocates a synchronously sensuous and cognitive approach to the drawing and the installation. Mayer’s intent refers to craftsmanship and the attention to detail resulting from long periods of observation underpinned by the process of revealing an object differently than through its iconic representation. In the piece made up of doorstops and in the drawing of eight banana skins, the artist attempts to go beyond the blatancy of the message to achieve a poetic language that leaves place to the interpretation of spectators.[1]
The indescribable and the suggested forge the link with the works of Florian Kiniques, an artist who does not solely focus on a project’s representation and exhibition but who is interested in the encounters and relations that his experiments create with spectators. The two works shown: Sa (mobile virtual poem), 2018, and Sans titre, 2016 consist of two frames on a black background and of typed words that have been cut out and stacked up in a corner of the frame. The first piece, taken from a series created around the expression “think carefully before you speak” (in French “Tourner sept fois sa langue dans sa bouche…” – Turning one’s tongue seven times before speaking”) can – in principle – move with the hand of the person turning it. When stopped, it can be shown horizontally, vertically or – like in the gallery window – be off-centre. Here, the work is presented at standstill in a nod to the doorstop work that leaves behind their original function.
Florian Kiniques rationalizes that the mystery of these two artworks lies in the notion of “showing whilst hiding” or to “show by unveiling”, which takes all its sense in a shop window presenting works that remain partially invisible. Indeed, the cut out words integrated in the closed frame are never completely legible. Do these words form a sentence? What meaning do they hide or embody? In the same way as a metaphor for automatic writing, everything articulates on the border between unveiling and evasion, between controllable and improvisation. [2]
In this group installation, the question does not refer to representation but rather, to twisting and suggesting.”
[1] S.Tiberghien, in L’art Même n°60, 2014
[2] Benoit Dusart, http://www.lartmeme.cfwb.be/no069/documents/AM69.pdf
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