MIART 2024
Léa Belooussovitch, Jacques Julien, Laura Garcia Karras
APRIL 12th - APRIL 14th, 2024
Fiera Milano City, Allianz MiCo, Pavilion 3 viale Scarampo, MILAN, ITALY
PARIS-B is delighted to participate for the first time to miart art fair in Milan, showcasing 3 french artists.
Starting with a particularly violent image – or, perhaps we should say an image corresponding to the everyday violence to which we have become accustomed – found in the media and derived from current events, Léa Belooussovitch makes a copy, a double, an alternative. She subjects this image to a series of transformations that decontruct the image definitively. First, she reframes it, concentrating only on a detail, the scale of which will inevitably be modified in the final format. Next, rather than falling into the sort of hyperrealism that has come back into fashion, she produces this new image on an unexpected surface: felt. […] Finally, this material naturally degrades as the artist’s pencil strokes cover its surface. From the clear and speckled original image the resulting work becomes downy, velvety, almost powdery, forming clouds of color that melt into one another, to such a point that without knowing the origin, we would think that we are looking at a purely abstract image. — Gaël Charbau
Jacques Julien’s works attempt to combine the analytical and poetic dimensions with humour. For Jacques Julien, a sculpture is a starting point towards the invisible double, the missing body or the hollow figure. Since the 1990s, the artist has been developing a reflection on form: its elaboration, its realization and its abandonment. As a result, his work revolves around the practice of sculpture in the studio, where time passes and is lost in the manner of the life that unfolds there, where the work is a series of empirical experiments that attempt to find a form of autonomy in keeping with the territory that gave birth to it, the relationship to space remaining at the centre of his questioning.
Surrounded by her tended plants and a few old botanical plates, protected from the outside world, Laura Garcia Karras reflects, doubts, conceives, studies, doubts again, observes, questions herself… Before it becomes a painting, her work is cosa mentale, an exercise of the mind which, by dint of being sharpened, tends to liberate Laura Garcia Karras from the prison of appearances. […] After a sketch barely traced with the tip of a pencil, the brush comes into action, the act of painting. With it, our gaze follows long strokes, where oil paint reveals the guts of the idea rather than its own consistency. Applied in a single gesture, the oil tolerates no hesitation, and it’s up to the artist to stretch it to reveal its flexibility, offering our view a palette of nuances. Among linear gradients and steep slopes, we try to imagine the pressure and caress of the brush, the thickness and fluidity of the material, the precision and vivacity of a perfectly skillful gesture. We can only imagine it as the workmanship does not betray the passage of the tool. — Anne-Laure Peressin