Ícaro Lira, Matthieu Saladin, Endre Tót, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet
Art-O-Rama | salon international d’art contemporain, Marseille | 27, 28 & 29 août 2021

Ícaro Lira, Matthieu Saladin, Endre Tót, Stéphane Barbier Bouvet
Art-O-Rama | international contemporary art fair, Marseille | 27, 28 & 29 august, 2021

For its second participation in the fair ART-O-RAMA, the gallery Salle Principale chooses to bring toge-ther three artists of different nationalities and generations whose work echoes with current events. The older generation is represented by the Hungarian artist Endre Tót. This narrow selection is comple-ted by the French artist Matthieu Saladin, born in 1978, and the Brazilian artist Icaro Lira, born in 1986. Endre Tót is an emblematic figure of conceptual art. Since the early 1970s the artist has been imple-menting strategies to escape the censorship of the repressive regime of the time. With the series ‘Joys’ and ‘Gladnesses’, he realized parodic actions of the culture of optimism. For Art-O-Rama, the gallery presents photographic documents of furtive actions carried out in Budapest that escaped the control of the authorities and actions testifying the joy the artist felt in 1979 in regaining his free-dom outside his native Hungary. Following a conceptual approach, Matthieu Saladin infiltrates the economic, social and political mechanisms he analyses in group relationships. He uses sound, print, performance, objects and in-formation technology. For Art-O-Rama, the artist exposes works resulting from a reflection on the problematic of debt, employer exploitation and control strategies in public space. Ícaro Lira analyzes the implications and evolution of Brazilian political and historical acts through do-cumentary, archival, archaeological and fictional works. He thinks history is a living matter constantly crushed by the weight of official narratives, written by the most powerful. In search of counter-narra-tives, he collects objects, texts, articles and images that link historical events he has directly expe-rienced or witnessed. In the context of the fair, two chairs by Stéphane Barbier Bouvet will be used as reception furniture. The « Contract » chair is between functional design and sculpture.