Galerie Paris-Beijing welcomes PBProject

A gallery grows over the years along with the development of the artists it represents. With the passing time it becomes hard for a galerist to play the role of promoter of new talents.

Galerie Paris-Beijing remains eager to make new discoveries, keeping its commitment started in 2014 to support the career of a whole new generation of young artists. This is why, from the September 2017, the gallery will create a 50 square meters exhibition space inside its perimeter with the aim of exclusively accompanying young and emerging artists. This space, will be open to all practices, and will offer carte blanche to the young artists with the rate of six exhibitions per year.

Léa Belooussovitch will inaugurate the PBProject with a new series of drawings on felt. Her work interprets images taken from various media sources, questioning the status of press images and how visual information is perceived and comprehended.

Our relations with the media, the archive, and the way visual information is perceived and comprehended are the core of Léa Belooussovitch ‘s work.

Through her new series of drawings on felt, she reinterprets in a veiled manner various images broadcasted on Internet or published in the press, reporting dramatic events of our contemporary history, such as the explosion of a bus bomb in Somalia, a shooting in Bangladesh, an attack in Pakistan or a nightclub targeted by Islamic terrorists in Istanbul.

Silhouettes of men and women in a precarious situation are delicately reconstituted by applying a large range of coloured pencils to the white, smooth and reassuring surface of a large segment of felt.

By mixing the pigments with the textile fiber, the drawing blurs the shapes due to the inner property of this material to trap the colours. The gesture leads to an abstract composition almost impossible to be brought into focus.

The original image sourced from the press is cropped in order to draw the attention on the central part of the action . This re framing device covers the tracks, leaving the resulting picture barely recognizable. However , some clues allow the gaze to re-establish a narrative pattern from abstraction. The support itself is transformed by the passage of the pencil, by acquiring volume, the drawing becomes sculpture.

The title Rémanences evokes the phenomenon by which a visual imprint subsists after the disappearance of the objective stimulus. In psychology, the term “retinal persistence” is used to describe the functioning of human vision and it refers to the optical illusion that occurs when visual perception of an object does not cease for some time after the rays of light proceeding from it have ceased to enter the eye. Any image lasts on the retina for approximately 1/25 seconds: “If, after looking at a colored object for a certain time, The eyes, are immediately covered by a handkerchief on which we apply both hands, will soon appear an image of a color complementary to that the object. “*

In the same way, during her creative process Léa’s view assimilates the snapshot , and when her gaze is turned towards the blank felt, the gesture seems to be carried by the persistent memory of forms, composition and colors.

The drawing resumes the clear, brightly-colored image sourced from the press, capturing on the field people in distress without any detour. The manual transcription allows the visual information coming from the photographic medium to become more tolerable.

The image appears as evanescent as a ghost, like the imprint of his source in our memories. Nevertheless its power is still there, in this intimate transcription of a tale of such brutality that makes the eye look away. Despite being physically close to the work, the viewer is yet kept far from the harsh reality: it is precisely this gap between the signified and and the signifier, that has been emphasized here.

Touching an aesthetic of the disappearance , the works of Léa Belooussovitch question our attitude towards violence, graphic violence in particular related to our society highlighting the vulnerability of a peculiar moment and witnessing the artist’s humanity.

Joseph Beuys had used the felt as a material symbolizing safety and refuge. For Léa, the choice of this textile that isolates from cold and noise, recalling the envelopment of Survival blankets, serves the purpose of the work: it suggests an empathy of the artist with his subjects as if she was carried by an instinct of protection.

*Pierre Auguste Adet, Annales de Chimie, 1835

Born in Paris in 1989, she currently lives and works in Brussels. After receiving a master’s degree in drawing from the ENSAV La Cambre in 2014, she is the recipient of the Prix Moonens in the same year, followed in 2015-2016 by a residence at Carrefour des Arts Foundation in Brussels. She is nominated for the 2015 edition of the Prix Révélations Emerige and wins the COCOF award at the Médiatine in Brussels at the beginning of 2017. She is the winner of the COCOF grant of the Brussels Maac in 2017, Allowing him to a residence and a personal exhibition. In November of next year it will be artist-in-residence at Bandjoun Station, an artistic project created by artist Barthelemy Toguo in Cameroon. She is a member of the Brussels-based  collective FRICHE, which organizes residences and exhibitions in abandoned spaces.