YVON LAMBERT Paris
Mircea Cantor
White sugar
for black days
March 14 - May 16, 2009
Opening Saturday March 14 at 6 pm
Seven future gifts, 2008
In 2002, Romanian artist Mircea Cantor had his
first exhibition at Yvon Lambert Paris, entitled The Right Man at the Right
Place. Since then, the artist has gained international recognition with
solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
The gallery is proud to welcome
Cantor’s work for the second time in Paris. The show follows a travelling
exhibition of the artist’s work in Great Britain that has received wide acclaim
as one of the most thrilling this year. The show began at Modern Art Oxford,
travelled to Arnolfini Bristol and concluded at Camden Arts Centre in London.
For his Parisian show, Mircea Cantor has decided to present recent
works as well as a new version of an animation he originally produced three
years ago:
Seven future gifts is a large-scale sculpture
composed of seven concrete ribbons that delineate imaginary gift boxes of
different sizes up to 4 x 4 meters. The work cleverly employs post-minimal and
post-pop vocabulary.
Easy is a series of drawings that are
presented as a storyboard. The work is laid out in the style of a comic strip;
each drawing constructs the story of two fingers jumping freely over a paper
wall. The artist introduces another dimension in this work. The drawings were
made by a professional cartoonist, and Cantor employs them as
ready-mades. The hand of the artist is removed, and so the production
process is typical of globalization. Thus Cantor reconsiders the principle of
craftsmanship and questions the notion of free artistic exploration.
Zooooooom is an animated movie that features fictional
characters walking towards an unfinished pyramid-shaped building. Once the
characters reach the edifice, they start dismantling it stone by stone. In the
end, the viewer’s perspective zooms out which amplifies the fictional aspect
giving the viewer the feeling he is being manipulated. The viewer increasingly
understands that the theme of the piece is deconstruction. In fact,
Zooooooom is based on a script that secretly tells the story of a
one-dollar bill. The economic reference is a metaphor for the fragility of
Western values.
With The New Times, like with an earlier
work by Cantor titled Les Mondes, the artist symbolically suggests a famous
newspaper; Somewhat paradoxically, here it is a subtraction that completes the
work, whereas with Les Mondes it was an addition.
Io
is a diptych of photos that feature a tunnel entrance and exit. It is impossible
for the viewer to tell which is which; the eye is therefore mislead in a
timeless frame and forced to choose without direction.
Response is an installation composed of rows of corncobs that
each have a letter written on them by the absence of kernals. Together the corn
cobs spell out “what should we do with the pearls?” This question is in fact a
take on a phrase that Saint Matthew said, “don’t throw your pearls in front of
pigs",which means wasting something by giving it to a person who will not use it
correctly.
All of Cantor’s works on view form a coherent whole
supported by explicit and implicit links with transgressive ideas, potentially
hidden from the possibility of transcending obstacles non different levels of
perception, but also from apprehension and from hopes that are obscured by the
ambiguity of space-time.
The generic title of the exhibition, White
sugar for black days, is in the same spirit, a manner of highlighting
paradoxical situations through language.
Musical performance by Alain Kremski
with sacred Buddhist bowls of Japan.
Thursday, March 26th,Friday, March 27th , and
Saturday, March 28th at 6:00 pm.
Contact : Mélanie Meffrer- Rondeau / melanie@yvon-lambert.com
YVON LAMBERT Paris
108 rue Vieille-du-temple 75003 Paris
t
+33 1 42 710 933, f +33 1 42 718 747
Tuesday-Friday : 10am - 1pm / 2:30
pm - 7 pm Saturday: 10 am - 7 pm
paris@yvon-lambert.com
www.yvon-lambert.com