gallery closed
until september 09, 2022
25 – 28 august, 2022
Claude Closky, Ícaro Lira, Dominique Mathieu
fair Art-O-Rama, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille
www.art-o-rama.fr
18 august – 02 october, 2022
Elsa Werth
immaterial fair Art-O-Rama, online
Patrick Bouchain, Claude Closky, Ícaro Lira, Dominique Mathieu, Gianni Pettena, Matthieu Saladin, Endre Tót, les gens d’Uterpan (Franck Apertet), Lois Weinberger, Zapatistes
The Line of Flight | group exhibition | june 09 – july 17, 2022
What if the real purpose of an art gallery were to attempt to escape from certain contradictory rules by dodging through an artistic landscape that is increasingly governed by them?
To achieve this, the collaborations selected by the gallery do not follow a strategic career plan; instead, they respond to a need to escape from the kind of “hard lines” Guattari and Deleuze describe as being the mechanisms of power. Both gallery owners and artists have to stray from the beaten track. Their obligations as business owners and vendors do not justify approaches which, however flexible, invariably end up turning into ruts to get stuck in. The alternative is to adopt a “line of flight” at the risk of getting lost, experimenting with spaces where our relationships with others are built on different foundations.
The little Salle Principale family, which has come together not so much through chance encounters as through circumstance, has been growing for 8 years without a fixed framework or direction, never seeking reassuring safeguards but always sniffing the air in troubled times. Paradoxically, the line of flight is drawn with some precision—just as a free spirit who refuses to stick to a fixed timetable might methodically fill the day. This line is constructed in partnership with the gallery’s artists whose works put flesh on its bones, creating the most unlikely environment—always in progress, never finished, constantly remodelled, growing larger when the need arises and protecting itself against the whims of the weather.
This exhibition, in the form of a family portrait, doubtless responds to our natural need to gather together at a point in our own shared history and that of the human race which, since the beginning of the decade, seems to have found that the “hard line” is the only path to follow when facing emergencies. The gallery and its artists wish to make it clear that our ability to dream is not dead, and that it will always be the driving force of our independence.
Dominique Mathieu_april 07, 2022
Translator Martyn Back