Something of life, no matter its size, its texture, its colour.. it will overflow anyway.
A trilingual monographical exhibition of work by Nina Childress, Geoffroy Gross and Thomas Jocher with franckDavid as translator at LAGE EGAL (HB55 Kunstfabrik), Herzbergstrasse 55 – Aufgang A. 1. OG. 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg from 14 to 30 September 2018. Opening Thursday 13 September from 5pm to 9pm.
http://www.geoffroygross.frhttp://ninachildress.com
http://thomasjocher.com
http://franckdavid.net
Cover.
This is not a monographical exhibition of one person, nor is it of a collective or a given group, so what exactly are we talking about ?
That is indeed the subject, a little of the what, but mostly of the how we talk about it...
Cover, in the musical sense : producing an interpretation of an existing piece in music, theatre, dance or painting...
Here is reality, an environment for memory, wherein the body can find a place to settle.
The image of images, the ambience of ambiences
/Atmosphère ! Atmosphère ! Est-ce que j'ai une gueule d'atmosphère?!!/*
a misunderstanding perhaps, or a subtitle ?
the image on a 1.1 scale
if reality is experienced on a 1.1 scale, without a doubt the image of reality produced by these three artists is as well.
The proof of reality is to be searched for in our memories which oscillates between how we look at the produced image and the non-reproduced image – even if for all three artists it is one of the means used – and the idea one retains.
The way we see can be felt as a means of inhabiting reality and is well and truly the key to a production where our bodies as spectators and those of the three artists crash-land.
Now the introductions have been made, the conversation may begin.
The only exteriority of the painting in the moment of seeing is the space in which it is placed, yet, and so, the only exteriority of the image of the painting is not reality itself, but the memory we make of the experience.
A documentary approach regarding the materials used to make the work, but contradicted by the indicatory use of the signs represented.
What remains of the source documents ? be they photographic in Childress' and Jocher's work or preparatory, even becoming the motif itself in Gross', as in the portraits of paper or the grey news. A definite loss of a number of signs in the images that leads us to the spin stage of a programme of domesticity.
Through the operation of condensation they make on the representation of chosen elements, the three artists simply engage in the restoration of reality, in what it contains of active promises, namely the ontologically political nature of life.
Everything is a question of ambition.
Although the manner of appropriation of reality remains the same for all three in the choice of tools used (duplication, sequencing, symmetry, covering, enlargment...) the results are extremely different, all three calling to mind states of life captured according to the chronological development of the human being : the opposition, simultaneously vigourous and sluggish, generally called adolescence, buying power and full authority.
These evocations have no artificial meaning and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The alteration of the image through its reproduction, the cover, are seen in the versions of good and bad paintings by nina Childress, the variations in scale by thomas Jocher and the obstination in perfecting the same manual gesture by geoffroy Gross.
Reproduction is at work here, the piece is made from a reproduction or is a series of reproductions. The accidents that occur (for example in printing for Childress, the overlapping of colours, their approximate chromaticness through saturation or loss of colour over time, missing parts or added areas by the machine that printed the template-document - subjects for Gross in his portraits of paper - for Jocher through the sliding from one format to another of the same image) focus their attention, augmenting the ordinariness of the chosen subjects, in this case markers of potential, necessary for expressing reality.
Reality, as a subliminal image in the original version, to be found located in every interpretation.
*Atmosphere ! Atmosphere ! Do I look as if I have the mug of an atmosphere ?!!
Arletty’s line to louis Jouvet in the film of marcel Carné Hôtel du Nord, 1938
