Adrien Vescovi: Jours de lenteur

From October 1, 2022 to January 29, 2023, Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain presents Jours de lenteur (Days of Slowness), a monographic exhibition by the artist Adrien Vescovi.

In his studio in Marseille, there are pigments, wash basins and jars of paint in which bits of textile are floating, rusty steel bars and suspended canvases waiting to be cut up and stitched onto others. Conceived and composed as paintings, the canvases are later hung in spaces where they interact with their environment—whether in nature, where they literally soak up the elements and the weather, or indoors, where their arrangements react to the architecture (one not excluding the other).

Grandeur and vulnerability come together in the work of Adrien Vescovi like two discordant notes that are brought into tune in a deliberately soft, safe, desaturated space. While disproportionate, the scale at which Vescovi conceives his paintings never seems excessive. Working at such a vast scale means working at the scale of nature itself, which also implies wrestling with shortcomings, whether in terms of space or emotions. Vescovi tries to elude or break up the imposed framework of painting and lose himself in a process which, by definition, cannot be completely controlled. Doing so, he not only accounts for chance and ephemeral or primitive manifestations, but rather conjures them. Rust, ochre, mint green, washed-out yellow: his “landscape juices,” as he calls them, capture the Mediterranean relief in its most earthy state.

Vescovi makes a point of working slowly. Of using less energy for obvious reasons of eco-responsibility. The salvaged textiles simmer in concoctions of natural pigments, and once they have been laid out on the floor to be hand stitched, they engage the artist in a physical struggle. These frictions produce traces that rub off on the material and well beyond. In the hands of the artist-craftsman-alchemist, the oversized work becomes a fragment of the intimate, the fabric a skin that wrinkles, stretches, tans, held together by stitches, from either sewing or suturing.

So how can we not also see in the soft and malleable monumentality of these works an attempt to oppose the harshness of urban environments? Covering the entire northern façade of the Casino Luxembourg, a surface of 14 by 38 metres, Vescovi’s suspended paintings are exposed to the wind and the natural elements. The “poor” materials from which they are made helps to smooth the edges, to rest the eyes and sublimate the cracks wherever they appear.

The magic also operates on the first floor, which has been transformed into a ceremonial space occupied by a painting that has been unfolded on the floor like a large tablecloth on grass and which, through the mere choice of horizontality, inverts the relationship between interior and exterior within the exhibition itself. The canvases lying on the ground or exposed to the vagaries of nature clash with a certain sterile consensus, which the artist has gently undusted with a stroke of his soiled and slightly coarse hand.

Artist biography
Adrien Vescovi graduated from the École supérieure d’art de l’agglomération d’Annecy. Born in 1981, he has lived and worked in Marseille since 2017 after many years spent in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie. His work has been shown in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Mexico. In 2021, he participated in the 22nd Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard Prize with the project Bonaventure, curated by Lilou Vidal. His work was the subject of a personal exhibition at the contemporary art centre Le Grand Café in Saint Nazaire and was shown at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. His works can be found in several public collections in France, among others at the Musée d’arts de Nantes (Cnap), the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in Marseille and the Conseil Général des Côtes d’Armor.

Curator: Stilbé Schroeder, Casino Luxembourg