- ARCHIVE / ART
Valentin Carron at Palais de Tokyo
Artist: Valentin Carron
Venue: Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Exhibition Title: Pergola: Monsieur
Date: February 19 – May 16, 2010
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Palais de Tokyo. Photos by André Morin.
Press Release:
1916: Le Corbusier builds a « Villa Turque » (Turkish Villa), the Villa Schwob, flanked by a pergola, in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). Some years later, he publishes photos of it in L’Esprit Nouveau. On the ground, in front of the villa, a white smear betrays retouching: the pergola has disappeared. Less than a century later, the Iraqi journalist Muntazer Al-Zaïdi throws his shoes at George W. Bush’s head.
Poltergeists are on the agenda at PERGOLA. Against the background of a haunted modernity, silhouettes of erased lives demand restitution: Swiss tavern lanterns cast a gloom over the museum space, the ventilation shafts bring back good memories of monumental architecture, the melancholy of the Renaissance seeps into this no man’s land, pneumatic dispatch breaches communication…. In the public spaces, the forsaken demand equal treatment in the art works by Charlotte Posenenske. This is the opportunity to discover for the first time the works of this important German artist, alongside the art objects of Valentin Carron, Raphael Zarka, Serge Spitzer, and the large shoe of the Iraqi Laith Al-Amiri.
On his way from vernacular iconography to religious symbols, passing through pastiches of public spaces, Valentin Carron interrogates identities through the forms that they celebrate. By invoking these archetypes, the artist doesn’t give in to forgeries, imitation, or even simple reproductions. Seemingly displaced, fragmented and multiplied, his works are either synthetic, serial, or monumental; since they have cashed in on minimalist abstraction, they are freed from a single and unchanging viewpoint.
Here, he uses humour to hijack objects, images, symbols, and their popular usages. Imagery from modern art as well as traditional and contemporary folklore redeploy under a regime of falsehoods, with the candour of a roundabout sculpture. The lanterns evoke either a fanciful Switzerland with mountains and chalets or a heavenly Midwest with wooden sculptures, natural parks, and amusement parks. All these works oscillate between the celebration and the criticism of a romantic and wild country—an elaborate myth that moulds a nation. But even though he plays with notions of authenticity, the handmade, the readymade, and the kitsch aesthetic, Valentin Carron holds out against all ideologies. Or rather, he gives in to all of them: he “poaches” in the matrix of popular consumer culture. Through his works, collective memory becomes a monument that glorifies each of our lives.
[1977] Born in Fully (Switzerland). Lives and works in Martigny (Switzerland).
Picture competition: Mathematical art
Amanda Gefter, Books & Arts editor
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Harness your mathematical intuition and your artistic eye for a competition being held by the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge in collaboration with Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach.
To enter, use the SURFER computer program to create beautiful images using simple mathematical equations. The idea is to create simple algebraic equations in 3 spatial coordinates and then, using the program, draw all the points that satisfy the equation. You can download the SURFER program from the competition's website and upload your images to their gallery.
You can also create your mathematical artwork on site at the Imaginary: Through the eyes of mathematics exhibit, which is now on view for the first time in the UK at the Isaac Newton Institute as part of the 2010 Cambridge Science Festival. An exploration of art, algebra and geometry, the exhibit has on view stunning and interactive visualizations and installations from algebraic geometry.For example, the image above, known as a "Björling surface" and created by Matthias Weber and Sunflow, is a so-called minimal surface, a surface which has the same curvature features as soap films. In 1844, mathematician E. G. Björling figured out how to find the minimal surface that passes through a curve. The surface shown here is generated with the basic curve as a Helix along which the strip is twisted at constant speed.
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The above image, "Vis à Vis", created by Herwig Hauser, depicts two forms of algebraic geometry standing opposite each other. The singular tip on the left looks at a curved but smooth hill on the right. At the singularity, various changes to the equation can result in unpredictable changes to the figure, which does not happen at smooth points.
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The hecatonicosachoron above, also called the "120-cell", is the four-dimensional analogue of the three-dimensional dodecahedron, which has 12 pentagonal faces, 20 vertices and 30 edges. Each of the hecatonicosachoron's 120 "faces" is itself a three-dimensional dodecahedron. Created by Etienne Ghys und Jos Leys, it has 600 vertices and 1200 edges. The images in the exposition show the hecatonicosachoron drawn through stereographic projection from a sphere in four dimensions onto three-dimensional space.
Imaginary: Through the eyes of mathematics is on exhibit at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, UK, through 17 March.
The Cambridge SURFER picture competition entry deadline is 20 March. For more information, rules and tips , visit their website
