Veronique Boudier / Bernhard Martin / Lari Pittman
VILLA ARSON – NICE
20 av, Stephen Liegeard
06105 Nice Cedex 2
T 06 64 53 68 52
contact: Camille Courtinat, courtinat [at] villa-arson.org
www.villa-arson.org
Veronique Boudier / Parcours de sante (Fitness course)
Born in 1961 in Nantua, l’Ain, France
Lives and works in Chateauvillain
Muse, seductress or homemaker, Veronique Boudier plays multiple roles. Whether she is dancing, armed, adorned with diamonds or covered with chocolate, she underlines with humour and poetry the complexity of the feminine. For this exhibition Veronique Boudier proposes a fitness course that winds its way through desire, sensuality and sexuality. On a melody dedicated to the body, the rhythm of the course intensifies as it passes from gentleness to nostalgia and finishes in violence. Her objects, installations, photographs and videos constitute an assemblage of elements which answer each other. They determine a temporality which associates the organic with the idea of a decline, a finitude. They are often banal gestures, minor feats, jokes and traps that function as so many quotations of the real.
Bernhard Martin
Born in 1966 in Hanover, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin
Bernhard Martin updates the cabinets de curiosite of the baroque period through the collection and appropriation of objects, fragments and images. This principle of formalist inquiry also applies to the conditions for hanging the work. For this exhibition he adds his personal collection of paintings to the presentation of his art. In both his sculptures and his paintings Bernhard Martin brings together the old and the new, the banal and the precious, with the need to attain a totality. He proposes an iconography linked to consumer culture, leisure, sex and drugs. Art history provides him with a vast field of investigation. He adapts the academic canons of portrait, landscape and genre painting. Pictorial techniques and strategies of different periods and styles mix together on the same canvas, creating enigmatic and labyrinthine compositions. The coloured surfaces are spattered, polished, brushed or striated, inviting the eye of the viewer to wander throughout.
Lari Pittman
Born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California
Lives and works in Los Angeles
A native of Los Angeles, Lari Pittman began showing his work in the 80′s and has taught painting at the University of California since 1993. He works in series by declining repertories of motifs. Each series associates a large-format painting covering several wood panels with canvases of various formats. A profusion of objects, signs and symbols, devoid of hierarchy, layer the smooth and glossy surfaces. Easily recognizable figurative elements play off abstract forms and ornamental motifs. Each painting constitutes a complex network combining contemporary or personal references and borrowings from the history of decorative arts, wallpaper or textiles. This proliferation creates dense compositions animated by an intense vitality, in which space is totally saturated. Lari Pittman plays with hybridization, tension and juxtaposition as means to build an anachronistic and fantasmagorical universe.
