Jim Shaw
Rather Fear God
April 2–May 21, 2016
Opening: April 2, 2016, 5–8pm
Praz-Delavallade
5, rue des Haudriettes
75003 Paris
“Fashioning in the apocalypse, isn’t this what we do every night over a face eager for death?”
–René Char, Aromates chasseurs, Gallimard, 1975
An art of dreams
You can dream of being an artist without really knowing what art is and the only way to make the dream come true is to create art yourself. So should you dream, or actually make art? The answer is both. Go into the darkness and surrender to whatever happens—good or bad, comic or tragic—and make something out of it. In any case, it’ll only be a dream that is pulling out all the stops. But by sharing it, it becomes less solitary, even if nobody can actually characterize exactly what is being shared.
An art of illusion
There are many ways of sharing dreams. The most common way is through idle chatter which surrounds us in illusions. In general all that remains is ashes.
An art of awakening
Would you call these captivating traces ashes? Does this sheet of paper really count for nothing after all it did to stop you in your tracks and make you scrutinize it for all this time? Do you realize the extent of this humble object’s power? It is made out of nothing, out of dreams, paper and pencil marks, and yet it has the power of subjugating you. Its power comes from the fact that in this work can be seen something that everyone is looking for and hasn’t found yet: how an illusion is transformed into reality.
Of course, a dream is but a dream, an illusion, but dreams also have some very real consequences. At first people only had vague notions of the question, until Freud provided the proof by putting his theories into practice on his patients. Dreams hide and in so doing reveal a void, an emptiness in which can be seen a manifestation of castration anxiety, a phenomenon that organizes every living part of us and the enjoyment of our body. When it reveals itself to us in all its mystery, this is what drives us amidst the flaws of conventional representations.
What is a work of art if not a sublime encounter with a new Medusa’s Head? It puts us face to face with the inherent enigma of meaning, which by the absence it evokes proves to us we exist more than any evidence of thought does.
Jim Shaw’s works are a cadavre exquis of infinitely multiplied representations (seeing as a dream is already the representation of other representations and often, in the case of Jim Shaw, of other works of art). They evoke a meaning that no amount of explaining can exhaust, until they are finally seen for what they are: the demonstration that nothing more than art can actualize the presence, not so much of life itself which goes without question, but of the endlessly captivating meaning that lies beyond.
–Marc Strauss, Psychiatrist & Psychoanalyst, December 2015
This last fall, Jim Shaw had a major solo survey exhibition at the New Museum, New York: The End Is Here. His work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous publications and solo exhibitions, including MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel, Switzerland; Chalet Society, Paris; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; CAPC – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; MoMA PS1, New York; Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; Swiss Institute, New York; MAMCO, Geneva or ICA, London. He was also included in The Encyclopedic Palace exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all New York; LACMA and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; CNAP/FNAC and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, among others. Shaw was born in Midland, Michigan in 1952, received his BA from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his MFA from CalArts. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
For all inquiries please contact Clémence Duchon: clemence [at] praz-delavallade.com / T +33 1 45 86 20 00
