Rémi Bragard, Anatole Maillot & Alexandra Pellissier
Collective show with Rémi Bragard, Anatole Maillot and Alexandra Pellissier
Novembre 18 - December 11, 2005
Friche la Belle de Mai, 13003 Marseille
Astérides presents a selection of works by Rémi Bragard, Anatole Maillot and Alexandra Pellissier. Video projections, sculptures, photographs and drawings form a body of works, projects and experiments within the Galerie de la Friche Belle de Mai, used as a space for experimentation. Moving from the monumental to the minimal, from introspection to outward projection in a poetics of space and materials, the exhibition as a whole reflects three distinct practices brought together here by a shared and deeply committed engagement with contemporary art.
The sculptures created by Rémi Bragard are made from pre-existing objects whose original meaning is countered by the artist’s choices of installation. They are arranged in such a way that the new form constitutes a whole animated by its own intrinsic dynamic. However, in reading the work, it becomes apparent that this movement is quickly frozen by an effect that seems to restrain it. The progression of the installation is halted in its momentum, as if its form were also meant to suggest the completion of the artist’s thought process. In the end, the objects erected by the artist become sculptures whose animation, whether intellectualized or actual, is stopped, giving the work a sense that has become futile.
From simple elements, Anatole Maillot explores the processes of creativity through the filter of the artist’s mental functioning. Installations, drawings, videos and photographs are all means used to discreetly reveal the architecture of a process of thought and the creation of forms. Attempts at systematic classification of isolated gestures, chosen with a certain taste for the absurd, become the visual expression of an inspiration held in suspension. Loop, repetition and mise en abyme are among the figures the artist uses to address the question of producing meaning and form. His precise drawings and the illustrative mapping of his projects such as desk blotters or work plans are at once the notation of future gestures to be performed and the gestures themselves. The work, tinged with distant humor, results from a mechanical effort of framing and a concise, meticulous articulation of thought.
With raw materials in their original tones, wood, tar, and fleeting effects of light and sound, Alexandra Pellissier constructs scenes, landscapes and architectures. The artist summons worlds whose boundaries between reality and imagination are blurred, drawing concretely on the model, the sculpture or the image. Her works, with their simple and stripped-down appearance, are conceived as receptacles for diffuse references, environments and atmospheres. Formally connected to the idea of the city, they distance themselves from it through a process of transforming the material. A shift occurs between the imaginary referent of the objects the artist constructs and their formalization. It is precisely this interval that gives rise to the poetic dimension of Alexandra Pellissier’s works and grants them their autonomy of evocation.
