Jonathan Binet
Sonia Kacem
24 January–29 March 2015
Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen
Davidstrasse 40
9000 St. Gallen
Switzerland
Jonathan Binet (b. 1984 in Saint-Priest, France, lives and works in Paris) deconstructs elements of painting and architecture in his works. He experiments with parts of canvases and traces of paint, which he sets in relation to the exhibition space. In the process the impulses of the artist are clearly perceptible. They are calculated and spontaneous gestures with which he brings together stillness and movement and the material and the fleeting into a rhythm. Sonia Kacem (b. 1985 in Geneva, lives and works in Geneva) makes use of a kind of performative painting for the composition of spatial images. Her installations arise from intuitive reaction and conscious arrangement and generate pictorial allusions. At Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen Binet and Kacem confront visitors with the aesthetic potential of spatial and material interactions.
With Jonathan Binet the process begins in the studio. In the artistic environment and its tools he searches for elements which seem to produce themselves: Simple dots or lines reveal themselves as driving energies and press for repetition, continuation or interruption. Binet enters an open dialogue with them. His concepts and impulsive bodily gestures concatenate with forms and substances of canvases. In the exhibition space he further develops these ideas and includes the new spacial framework—as at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. Among other things the Parisian artist is showing a repetition of the same form of canvas, whereby he always highlights different features. This multiplication gives him experimental freedom and enables a sequence of actions and reactions that reinforces the indexical character of the work. The traces of the artist and the preceding processes remain readable. Binet allows things to happen and is rebellious in doing so: he takes space, time and materials down from their pedestal and spreads them out next to each other.
Sonia Kacem finds the basic elements of her work on the street or in memories and then engages in a play of the senses. The artist from Geneva drapes both waste objects and newly produced elements and creates an instinctive dramaturgy between colours, forms, materials and their interplay. At the Kunst Halle these are coloured foam balls and black, elastic strips of fabric. As in painting, Kacem accentuates the materiality of the objects through their juxtaposition and applies them to the space, whereby the context also has an influence. She wants to leave the associative connotation of the sculptural to viewers but does not shy away from her own recollections of images which are at the beginning and end of her sketches. Inspirations such as the game of Tetris, bales of hay or filled shelves in a shopping centre open up fields of thought—the throw-away society, product cycle or repeating natural and cultural forms. The artist does not want to charge the materials artificially and stipulate their meaning but rather to deliver a field of tension.
The expansive installations by Binet and Kacem are the results of the encounter between objects and people which interact and continually react to one another. In this open and simultaneously closed circuit humane and intuitive interaction with forms and materialities is sought, in which the experience with the materiality itself is at the fore. The anti-monumental remains of her artistic practice break with conventional hierarchies and transport visitors into the middle of the spacial picture where aesthetics, dynamism and contemplation can be physically experienced.
High-resolution images can be found here. For further questions please contact Giovanni Carmine or Salome Hohl.
The Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is supported by St. Gallen City Council, Kulturförderung Kanton St.Gallen, Swisslos, Migros-Kulturprozent, Martel AG, St. Galler Tagblatt. The educational programme is made possible by Raiffeisen and Kulturförderung Appenzell Ausserrhoden.
