Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: l’espace épisodique (episodic space)
Benoît-Marie Moriceau: Rien de plus tout du moins (Nothing more at least)
11 April–22 June 2014
Opening: Thursday 10 April, 5–9pm
Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac
La Manufacture des Œillets
25-29 rue Raspail
94200 Ivry-sur-Seine
France
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 2–6pm, Saturday–Sunday 2–7pm
Free admission
T+ 33 1 49 60 25 06
contact [at] credac.fr
Born in 1978 and 1980 respectively, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza and Benoît-Marie Moriceau are from the same generation of artists, although they are meeting for the first time at Le Crédac.
It is no doubt their connections with the visible, the vestige, and memory, closely associated with the spatial and political context surrounding those links, that resonate in their work. Rather than seeking some common denominator between the two featured artists, the idea driving this series of exhibitions has been to provide a venue for a recent piece, often an on-site work, which would allow the artists to display their full measure. Occasionally a certain complicity does arise, but it is one that holds no obligations for the participants.
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: l’espace épisodique
Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza has constructed her work around the tension between the visible and the invisible. Invited to exhibit at Le Crédac in 2007, for example, she produced an almost imperceptible piece titled mirages(s) 2. ligne imaginaire, équateur (2007), a long rubber line on the wall at eye level running parallel to the floor. Like the way one indicates the horizon, this line, radical and precise at one and the same time, conjures up the imaginary line of the equator in her native Ecuador.
Peñafiel Loaiza has continued to adhere to this esthetic position and the striking economy it shows in the means it employs. There is a play of appropriation and subversion that takes shape, for instance, in acts of destruction (pages with holes, erased ink, rubbed-out images) and reconstruction (backwards reading and rewriting) which are perpetrated against images and language. At the Manufacture des Œillets, the former eyelet factory that is now home to Le Crédac, Peñafiel Loaiza intends to conjure up the earlier use of the site, that is, labor, the noise of machines, mechanical operations. In this building, constructed in 1913 from the American “Daylight Factory” model, daylight once punctuated the machine pace of the work. The artist is focusing on this aspect of the venue, which is inseparable from the world of the working classes, and will be doing art work in the center’s exhibition galleries, as well as the oldest part of the site (the Manufacture’s Main Hall), specifically its clock. The large clock that parceled out the working day of the laborers is now stopped and only its light continues to function.
Benoît-Marie Moriceau: Rien de plus tout du moins
Benoît-Marie Moriceau evolves through the formats of a wide range of interventions, from the most spectacular to the most invisible, while always infusing the chosen venue with an atmosphere, a climate of uncanniness, oddity, something inexplicable or eerie. Moriceau begins with a context, a given place in which he integrates the mechanisms of representation. He seems to be attempting to carry out one of the rules laid down by certain artists starting in the 1970s, that of the “total installation.” He deploys a wealth of means to modify and dramatize the site he is taking over.
Following a process of careful observation of the space occupied by Le Crédac and the center’s daily workings, the artist will arrange “exhibition situations,” like so many shifts back and forth between the inside and the outside. Moriceau will be working with the large hall, which is almost entirely enclosed in glass, a veritable promontory that affords a priceless view of the city. It is a sure bet that with Benoît-Marie Moriceau’s work, a venue is never a guarantee that it will respect the function it was originally designed for, quite the opposite. In this case the standard white cube may be but an excuse for an appointment with the unexpected, a place where fiction and reality meet, making possible what the artist is constantly in search of, revelation.
–Excerpts from the press release
Benoît-Marie Moriceau is represented by Mélanie Rio Gallery, Nantes.
Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza is represented by Alain Gutharc Gallery, Paris.
Press information
MYRA – Magda Kachouche, Yannick Dufour, Timothée Nicot
T +33 (0) 1 40 33 79 13 / myra [at] myra.fr
A member of the Tram and DCA network, Crédac enjoys the generous support of the City of Ivry-sur-Seine, the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs for Île-de-France (Ministry of Culture and Communication), the General Council of Val-de-Marne, and the Regional Council of Île-de-France.
Media partners: 02, Slash
