PAOLA PIVI
I wish I am fish
ANTHONY McCALL
Vertical Works
RIVANE NEUENSCHWANDER & CAO GUIMARAES
Quarta-feira de cinzas / Epilogue
Estuaire Nantes Saint-Nazaire Biennale 2009
Curator: Sophie Legrandjacques, artistic director of Le Grand CaféAs part of the Estuaire 2009 Nantes – Saint-Nazaire event, Le Grand Café is proposing an artistic tour of Saint-Nazaire.
Alongside two works permanently installed in the town, Felice Varini’s Suite de Triangles, 2007 and Gilles Clément’s Le Jardin du Tiers-Paysage, 2009, Le Grand Café presents three exhibitions devoted to individual artists on different sites: Paola Pivi, Anthony McCall, and Rivane Neuenschwander & Gao Guimarães.
Although each is very different, all of these exhibitions confront us with experiences marked by a pervasive strangeness. Each artist explores, in their own manner, the perception of the (in)visible and the passage from the real to the unreal, amplifying reality’s abstract character.
LE GRAND CAFÉ, Contemporary Art Centre – Paola Pivi – I wish I am fish – June 5th – August 30th, 2009
Paola Pivi is an Italian artist, born in 1971 and now living in Alaska. She established herself on the international art scene more than 10 years ago with a singular and formally unpredictable body of work. Whether through installations, photographs or performances (overturning an aeroplane, photographing zebras on the ice flots, releasing a leopard amid fake cups of cappuccino…), Paola Pivi creates unusual and ambivalent situations that disturb our habitual reference points for understanding what we see. Proceeding from visions that are then created ‘for real’, the artist constructs a universe in the form of a visual puzzle where the wild natural world frequently borders the artificial. A distinctive form of language emerges from the meeting of dream and reality, opening up a new field of possibilities for the spectator: an unusual, poetic and untamed space.
At Le Grand Café, Paola Pivi is showing several new works brought together around a film produced for the occasion: I wish I am fish. Which is concerned with making goldfish fly…
LE LiFE (Submarine Base) – Anthony McCall – Vertical Works- June 5th – August 16th, 2009
In the 1970s Anthony McCall, a filmmaker from Britain settled in New York, made a series of films of “solid light” based on simple geometric figures, in particular the cone, drawn directly onto the film stock. His approach presents itself as an act of radicalism towards cinema: moving away from the screen, projecting a cinema-without-image, affirming the phenomenon of projection in and of itself while at the same time reaffirming the ideas of performance and process that underlie cinematic technique.
For Estuaire 2009 Le Grand Café is showing, for the first time in France, a group of “Vertical Works” made digitally between 2005 and 2009. These works explore in a single gesture the combination of drawing with cinema and with sculpture, showing Anthony McCall to be an artist inscribed in current debates surrounding the mutation of art forms. Playing on the architectural properties of the site, its exceptional height in particular, he invites the public to an experience whereby the body, as if absorbed by McCall’s films of solid light, can nestle into an immaterial parcel of space. The visitor becomes “spect-actor” of a silent moment, of a sensorial experience as subtle as it is fascinating.
LA GALERIE DES FRANCISCAINS – Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães – Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue – June 5th – August 30th, 2009
The Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, born in 1967, has developed a multiform body of work in which the themes of language and narration are recurrent. Informed by the Neo-Concrete movement of 1970s Brazil, she speaks willingly of a “magic realism” that she seeks to make apparent in her work. In 2006, she joined with Cao Guimarães, an Brazilian artist filmmaker, born in 1965, to produce Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue (Ash Wednesday/ Epilogue). The film reveals a ballet of ants busily transporting the confetti left covering the ground after the carnival. It makes for a strange spectacle, this microscopic animal society in action after mankind’s “festive exuberance”.
Free Entry
Hours: Daily (except Monday) 10am to 7pm
LE GRAND CAFÉ, Centre d’art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire (F)
Place des Quatre z’horloges, 44 600 Saint-Nazaire – France
T + 33 (0)2 44 73 44 00 – F + 33 (0)2 44 73 44 01
grand_cafe@mairie-saintnazaire.fr / www.grandcafe-saintnazaire.fr
