LONG FORMAT ARTICLE, Patrick Gilliéron Lopreno | Swiss photographer Patrick Gilliéron Lopreno presents us with a photographic «carte blanche» dedicated to the Swiss painter Eugène Burnand to mark the centenary of his death.
Pablo Picasso, then at the height of his fame, drew a sketch on the tablecloth in a restaurant one day. The restaurant owner offered to buy his meal in exchange for his drawing and signature. Picasso replied, very amused and not fooled, that he could buy his meal with his drawing, but that he wasn't looking to buy the whole restaurant with his signature. An anecdote that speaks volumes about the place of signatures in the art market and the keen interest they arouse among collectors. Proudly displayed, like a sacred part of its creator, the signature often represents much more than simple authentication. A reflection of personality, the autograph or, more generally, the signature can possess a certain plastic and aesthetic quality. Signatures (X) is a contemporary art exhibition by Smallville, an artist collective based in Neuchâtel.
LONG FORMAT ARTICLE, Vinciane Vuilleumier | Works on paper always hold a special fascination for me. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the support is always present and plays an active role in the image - it is, after all, the negative space we use to bring out the light. On canvas, a smooth, unified pictorial layer leaves the illusion that we're looking at an image, only - the technique is so perfect that it masks the object and the creation under the guise of a scene. On a sheet of paper, the traces bring out the drawing, but the marked surface remains visible - its grain, its hue, the marks of time and wear, it lends its matter to the composition.
ARTICLE LONG FORMAT, Vinciane Vuilleumier | Paintings teach us to see. They exercise our sensibility: through paintings, the country becomes a landscape. Alain Roger speaks of artialization in visu: cultural productions, whether artistic or literary, dynamically constitute regimes of vision, showing us how to aesthetically see portions of reality that we had hitherto skimmed over. The first country to become a landscape was the countryside, followed by the seaside, the immensity of the ocean, the grandiose spectacle of the Alps. By dint of having seen such beautiful representations, we take a fresh, sensitive look at reality when it presents itself in these forms contemplated elsewhere.
We hang it on the wall, stick it in a notebook, slip it into a book, send it to a loved one, keep it preciously in a wooden box with the rest of the collection: the postcard is everywhere. There's nothing quite as vivid a feeling as finding a postcard in a second-hand book that wasn't once ours, and which bears the markings of an exchange or a memory we've missed.
Les bouquins du mardi - Jonas Follonier Combining photographs by Patrick Gilliéron Lopreno and texts by Slobodan Despot,...
Memory is elastic: it can be configured at will - and will it must. This requires a certain asceticism, of course, because in numbers, relief is lost: to choose is to renounce, said André Gide. And that's the key: to reduce the quantity of content that crosses our consciousness, to pay attention with discernment, so that certain content becomes a node in a memory network that can be chiselled like a work of art.
By painter Vinciane Vuilleumier
A look back at the opening day on June 13
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