Category Archives: Shows

Paris: Ludo ‘I’ve been missing you’ Solo Show

June 30, 2017 butterfly

French artist Ludo is returning to Paris after five years with a new solo show namely titled ‘I’ve been missing you’ at Magda Danysz Gallery.

After extensive travelling, creating installations in New York, monumental walls throughout the world and institutional projects, like at the Power Station of Art Museum in Shanghai, Ludo invites us for a journey through his multi-faceted works, whether photographs, paintings, drawings or sculptures.

In this exhibition LUDO also presents an installation made up of an army of fireflies whose phosphorescent light dazzles and envelops while letting emerge a certain question about the relation of man to technology. Hybrid creatures emerge from the artist’s imagination with botanical precision using a colour palette ranging from grey to his signature green.

The images of LUDO explore the environment, the future, the space, the human. His biotechnological creations come to colonize the three levels of the gallery and plunge us into a chimerical universe where we find the passions and multiple inspirations of the artist.

In parallel to the show, wandering through the streets of Paris in the 20th and 11th district, visitors can discover some of the artist’s latest creations, from a snake to a ‘BeeLice’ and a Grim Reaper.

View full set of pics here

Ludo – I’ve been missing you
Until 29 July 2017
Magda Danysz Gallery,
Rue Amelot, Paris

Paris, Shows

Paris: Tristan Eaton ‘Uprise’ Solo Show

June 26, 2017 butterfly

US artist Tristan Eaton who is currently on the front cover of SC Exhibition Magazine is exhibiting in Paris at Galerie Itinerrance. The solo exhibition titled ‘UPRISE’ is a visual history of protest and resistance. A look back on human history reveals time and again how the powerless have risen to topple the powerful and how the little man can vanquish tyrants with peaceful protest and the power of ideas. This exhibition is a reminder of that awesome power, a reminder that protest and resistance is a human trait and a human right.

Tristan Eaton mentions:
‘UPRISE’ is a visual history of protest and resistance. As an artist, I am compelled to paint what consumes me. In the age of Donald Trump, rising racism and xenophobia, corporate greed and blatant human rights violations across the globe, I am consumed by the desire for change. I am consumed by hope for a better world and a need to throw out of power those who don’t deserve it. As we all know, history will repeat itself. A look back on human history reveals time and again how the powerless have risen to topple the powerful and how the little man can vanquish tyrants with peaceful protest and the power of ideas. This exhibition is a reminder of that awesome power, a reminder that protest and resistance is a human trait and a human right. Wether it’s Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma, an anonymous man in Tiananmen Square or a Palestinian child with a sling shot, change always comes at a price and with much endurance. In these works, I hope to honor those brave leaders of the past, while emboldening the freedom fighters of our future.

Many international artists attended the opening like Iranian female artist Golnaz Behrouznia, Ben Eine (UK) and C215 (FR) to name a few.

In parallel visitors can wander in the streets of the 13th District enjoy a series of murals painted by Tristan Eaton like a water tower next to the nearby hospital.

UPRISE by Tristan Eaton
Until 8 July 2017,
Galerie Itinerrance
4 Boulevard du Général d’Armée Jean Simon
75013 Paris

Paris, Shows

Paris: Belin ‘Post Neo Cubism’ Solo Show

June 19, 2017 butterfly

Having exhibited in Europe, US, Canada and Mexico, Spanish artist Miguel Ángel Belinchón aka Belin is currently showing his first Parisian Solo Show called ‘Post Neo Cubism’, curated by Nicolas Couturieux.

Self-taught artist Belin has grown internationally as one of the leading hyper-realistic graffiti artists. For over the past 15 years, Belin’s mastering technique of the spraypaint has been his signature style, free hand flowing directly from the realism of his imagination without the use of preparatory stencils, with the precision of lines and proportions so crucial in hyperrealism.

A visit to Málaga in 2016, home town of Spanish master, Pablo Picasso, has been decisive in his career and triggered a new artistic style for the artist: Post – Neo Cubism, a balance between cubism and realism.
Belin started to deconstruct his hyperrealist style and break the mould of reality, free from forms and rules, with the representation of multiplied view angles, mixing geometrical elements, patterns and textures, along with vibrant colours to create dynamic portraits, fusing hyperrealism with abstraction. People’s faces and bodies, disassembled and then reassembled, multiply their human nature to illustrate all the nuances and differences of expressions and feelings.

Using spray cans, oil painting and pencil, these dynamic portraits have such accurate expressive details of the faces, the wrinkles, the eyes, ears, noses, and mouths, that they seem incredibly ‘alive’.

Through twenty canvasses and ten pencil drawings, the current exhibition features icons and persons who captured Belin’s life as well as symbols from France to Andalucia. Family members and friends are illustrated as well as a deconstructed self portrait. Belins pays also homage to the great masters with portraits of Pablo Picasso, Dali, Keith Haring to Frida Kahlo and female icons like Mona Lisa.

Many artists turned up to celebrate the opening with Belin such as Ogre, Thomas Canto and Miss Van to name a few.

In parallel to the exhibition, Belin is also releasing a puzzle version of his ‘Marion’ painting and a show poster.

View the full set of pics here

Belin – Post Neo Cubism
Until 25 June
24 Rue Beaubourg
Paris

Paris, Shows, Uncategorized

Paris: Aya Takano – The Jelly Civilization Chronicle

May 26, 2017 butterfly

Japanese painter, illustrator, sci-fi writer and manga artist Aya Takano, is exhibiting ‘The Jelly Civilization Chronicle’, a selection of 26 paintings and several drawings on celluloid, all preparatory studies for a 186-page manga, unveiled in its entirety at Galerie Perrotin in Paris.
Aya Takano belongs to the Superflat movement and Kaikai Kiki, the artistic production studio created in 2001 by Takashi Murakami. Inspired by all art forms, from erotic stamps of the Edo Period to impressionism, from Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, the artist has built a universe all her own. Her mythology has constructed itself little by little, through her creations and visions of the unknown.

The 2011 tsunami that struck the north eastern coasts of Japan and led to the nuclear accident of Fukushima was a real wake-up call for the artist and this catastrophe deeply influenced her work. Preferring oil paint, which is more natural, to acrylic paint, for example, Aya Takano seems to pursue a new artistic quest, both humble and spiritual, influenced by a unique interest in science and guided by an absolute respect for nature and human life.

Aya Takano has a special gift for storytelling, which she expands and enriches from one image to the next. She has created a 186-page manga entitled The Jelly Civilization Chronicle, exhibited in its entirety at the Galerie Perrotin, in English. After taking form in her imagination, the work came to life in very colourful preparatory oil paintings and drawings on celluloid. We find all the themes and obsessions of the artist from the beginning of her career, 20 years ago: self-discovery, feminine beauty, science fiction, the fight between light and shadow and the pursuit of an immaterial ideal, freed from all restraints of gravity.

The manga stages the adventures of Naki and Minaka in a journey from the “Machine Civilization” to the “Jelly Civilization”. In a back-and-forth voyage between eras and spaces, the two characters meet in the sky and travel to the outer edges of the universe via unexplored places or planets with unknown magical powers…

Initially dressed in emblematic high school uniforms, they are in turns nude or swathed in traditional kimonos or dreamlike clothing made of a mysterious jelly, a living organism that feeds off of water and oxygen. Surrounded by fabulous creatures, they are also accompanied by their ancestors, represented in the form of animals. They learn about the stars, meet a queen in an owl mask and encounter beings with star-tattoœd skin.
On the ruins of a nuclear reactor, after numerous trials and metamorphoses, the herœs return to the peaceful society they originally came from. This “Jelly Civilization” combines tradition, memory and eternity: “Memories of all the people wearing ‘jelly’, memories of all the ‘jelly’, memories of what is happening now, of what might happen…”
The result is the fruit of an imagination that feeds itself, full of every possibility of illusion, like an ideal space on the border of dreams and desires. “I think it is omnipresent inside ourselves and everywhere,” explains Aya Takano. The Jelly Civilization Chronicle represented a real challenge for the artist, who devoted herself to telling the recent story of Japan, while crystallizing within it her worries and obsessions as she never had before: it took an entire year to develop this original and ambitious work, presented and distributed first time in Paris, at the Galerie Perrotin.

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View the full set of pics here

Aya Takano
The Jelly civilization
Galerie Perrotin, Paris

London, Shows

London: Ryoji Ikeda π, e, ø @Almine Rech

May 17, 2017 butterfly

Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda is currently showing a solo exhibition ‘ π, e, ø,’ organised with Olivier Renaud-Clement at Almine Rech Gallery in London

Ryoji Ikeda has gained a reputation as a unique artist working across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visual materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations.

The exhibition title π, e, ø stands for three important mathematical constants;

π (pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter)
e (the base of the natural logarithm)
ø (phi, golden ratio: a+b/a = a/b), all of which are infinite.

The show focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and aesthetics.
Through the use of mathematical vocabulary, the artist seeks to present infinity in a visual way.
The works on paper, multiple variations of 1×1 surfaces of white and black from series of numbers, the transcendental and the irrational, are exhaustively visualised in decimal expressions reaching 1.25 million digits a piece. These signs are beyond the limits of human comprehension or experience, and must be taken for wonders — apparitions of ominous and numinous beauty. A restrained elegance and minimalism reigns throughout, but the monochromatic surfaces belie the furious richness and staggering detail within.

Works from Ryoji Ikeda’s time and space series, which convert the notion of Time onto 2-dimensional surfaces (Space), are presented together with works from the test pattern series that refers to the mathematical constants π, e, ø and uses colors which are developed during the colour separation process of 16mm film.

More silent epiphanies are present in related works that elegantly visualise silence and time. 0’10” shows the numerical countdown from 10 to 0 that precedes films, making physically manifest the immaterial and temporal notion of ten seconds of 16mm film. Similarly, the work 4’33’, which consists of the physical equivalent of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of blank 16mm film with time code, clearly references John Cage’s hugely philosophical meditation on the impossibility of silence.

data.scan [nº1-9] is part of Ryoji Ikeda’s ongoing datamatics project (2006-) in which he explores the potential to perceive the invisible multi-substance of data which permeates our world. It is a series of experiments in various forms – audiovisual concerts, installations, publications and CD releases – that seek to materialise pure data. The audiovisual installations are composed of a combination of mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. Elaborately composed microscopic visualisations are shown on nine displays on plinths, all tightly synchronised with a minimal soundtrack and features sets of data from recent meta-scientific investigations mapping the human body and the astronomical universe (structures of errors, DNA sequence | chromosome nº11, morse code studies, molecular structure | protein, 4-dimensional hypercube | nodes). Positioned horizontally in intimate relation to the viewer’s body, the installation offers an intimate perception of each singular data investigation.

Ryoji Ikeda – datascan

Echoing data.scan installation, is an ambiguous archeology of encoded knowledge from the systematics series. Systematic patterns of data expression, from archival computer formats to contemporary technology referring to the technological progress of the digital age are displayed. These “primitive” systems, cultural artifacts and remnants of earlier technologies belong to a technological continuum beginning with the earliest stirrings of coded communication. The memory of a song forgotten in the piano roll, is now only silence, absence.