Exhibition

April 16 - June 11, 2005
Galerie de la Friche la Belle de Mai, 13003 Marseille

Through around twenty works employing techniques such as painting, photography, 3D animation, and digital media, the exhibition Centre Ville South explores representations of the city and its relationship to the human being. Revealing divergences in perspective scale and in the physical involvement of the artist within the urban environment, the works reflect different flows, structures, and moods of an improbable city.

Created from photographic shots that imply an initial distancing from the subject, Joffrey Ferry’s paintings offer an aesthetic reappropriation of purely utilitarian spaces (road infrastructure, housing blocks, intersections). The zooms performed by the artist reveal not just places, but also how they are forgotten through daily use that has become banal. Emptied of activity, his paintings focus the gaze on non-distinctive signs—overpasses, gas stations, fast-food chains—accentuating a timeless and standardized point of view, all the more so because no individuals are visible. The artist seeks to present a logotypic vision of the city, reduced to its lowest common denominator: the representation of elements inherent to any metropolis, instantly recognizable and here restored to a certain dignity—its non-places.

In Mathieu Bernard-Reymond’s digitally altered photographs, reality seems to have been subtly diverted from its course. The city appears caught between fiction and reality, beautiful yet frozen, imbued with desolation, evoking a sense of absence. Is the aestheticization of the urban an illusion in the quest for well-being in the city? Towers saturated with imagery, familiarly reminiscent of imposing hyper-centers, seem to suggest that living there is only made bearable through television’s virtual extraction of its inhabitants. Human presence is nonetheless signaled by their wandering in areas where natural elements still exist (parks, ports). However, these presences seem to result from a manipulation of reality. Is the city doomed to optimize its inhabitants’ behavior by stripping them of identity, save for the one imposed by its urban planning?

A portrait by Gérald Garbez seems to suggest so. The artist takes a sensitive approach to the city, creating photographic images that reflect intimately experienced moments. The acute composition of his framings attests to his embeddedness, at a given time, within its walls. Through his traversal of the surface and the underground of the city, it is drawn in a hyperrealist manner, structured by its layouts, chance encounters, and compositions born of randomness. Yet the resulting sense of emptiness and anonymity may suggest that this privileged relationship is illusory.

Sven Påhlsson uses 3D animation techniques and a video game aesthetic to address the city’s configuration through its suburbs and transportation networks. The artist’s fabricated worlds invoke the excessive, repetitive urban development of American cities. His sociological and architectural observation of the suburbs leads him to recreate a city devoid of all human presence, defined solely by its endless replication. The viewer is caught in a pseudo video game sequence devoid of any recreational aspect, stripped of the possibility of action within an urban system destined for self-destruction.

From erasure to artificial creation, through to contemplation, the representations of the city gathered in Centre Ville South all share a distinct aesthetic of major urban centers. Though their modernity is highlighted, it nonetheless reveals an ethnology of solitude.