Making faces…!

 We asked the artists to make heads. Many responded, and offer us small and medium formats specially designed for this friendly "tête-à-tête". A collective exhibition, bringing together 19 artists, painters and sculptors, the rhythm of which is given by repetition of this recurring motif: the human head. An inexhaustible source of inspiration, the head, its face, portrait, can be called every name under the sun, especially in French... without forgetting that the word “tête” originates from the Latin word “testa”, meaning a clay pot!

 Painters:

Georges BRU - Pierre DESSONS - Marc GIAI-MINIET - Abraham HADAD - Jörg HERMLE - Bernard LE NEN - Bernard OUVRARD - Denis POUPPEVILLE - Marc PRIALNIC - Bernard PRIVAT - Victor SOREN - Jean-Paul SOUVRAZ - Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX - Isabelle VIALLE

Sculptors :

Frédéric BRIGAUD - Yukichi INOUE - Hans JORGENSEN - Janos KALMAR  Pascale PROFFIT

 

 

 

Thus the animal is never far behind the mask of humanity. In Bernard PRIVAT's portraits what counts most is the energy, tension and presence contained within.

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s impossible to make a head” said A. Giacometti.

For Bernard OUVRARD, to make a head, you need to get into it, in order to reveal its inner structure and try to grasp the mystery of being.

The head can escape from figuration and become a single sign in Janos KALMAR sculptures, like the bent contour of a bust which rhymes with space.

Some like to deform and deconstruct this amazing receptacle. Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX, often presented here since the exhibition "Dé-figuration» in May-June 2013...

 

 

 

...in which also participated Bernard LE NEN and 

his dark magic spell, and

 

 

 

 

Jörg HERMLE who, with a strong expressionist tone, paints a humanity stupefied by boredom, selfishness and voracity.

 

 

The head can proliferate into a theatrical carnival like crowd in Denis POUPPEVILLE's works!

The head can also be nostalgic of childhood loves. In Pierre DESSONS's works, dolls and puppets, are characters of a perverse toys and figurines theatre, representing his deeply buried childhood memories.

 

In Victor SOREN's drawings, darkness represents the nostalgia of a forbidden childhood.

The sculptor Yukichi INOUE embarked on the challenge of realizing "A Thousand and One Heads" in direct carving in Okinawa stone. Here, the brutality of the shape wants to break away from the refinement of his work from previous periods.

Conversely, the refinement and delicacy of Frédéric BRIGAUD’s bronze “Mutilated Ishtar head” invokes the mysteries of the Sumerian goddess of Love and War…

 

In Jean Paul SOUVRAZ’s work, the head may also have no countenance, leading us to imagine its animalistic skull and death-mask.

 

 

Heads can also become a vegetal entanglement of roots between two kingdoms, a head-mangrove in Isabelle VIALLE's recent series, "Artères chaotiques".

 

 

 Hans JORGENSEN’s heads appear within his permanent dialogue with the vital and primitive strength inscribed in the wood's fibre.

 

 

With Marc GIAI-MINIET, faceless heads are masked: chrysalis heads, empty but crossed with pipes exuding exchanges of a troubling alchemy.

 

 

 

   

And the very eastern roundness of Abraham HADAD's heads and shapes, his wide-open-eyed faces! His models are seized in an ideal daily life, fixed by the painter's imagination in the frontal eternity of the picture…

The amazement smile and feigned innocence, are also in the spirit of Pascale PROFFIT's sculptures, but in a completely different way. Between smirk and voluptuous smile, her heads impose their enigmatic presence.

 

There is also the obsessive apparition of a mysterious lost profile in Marc PRIALNIC's works.

 

Finally, there are Georges BRU's heads with their improbable and ghostly anatomy. They belong to some indeterminate characters permanently searching their reality amid their existence's mists.

 

 But what is a head? The meeting of these nineteen artists in the great diversity of their expression poses this endless question, and we are far from exhausting the subject. A. Giacometti was probably right: it is impossible to make a head! Then, let's look at these heads which are looking at us and let's be pervaded by the unfathomable mystery of creation.

 

  Exhibition from 25 January to 11 March 2017 

Opening Wednesday, 25 January starting at 6:00 pm

Galerie ART aujourd’hui
8, rue Alfred Stevens
Paris 9 (M° Pigalle)

Open Wednesday to Saturday 2:30 pm-7:30 pm
Contact: Marianne RILLON: 06 52 34 98 24
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.galerie-art-aujourdhui.com

 

 Here, the exhibition's photo report ( photos PhR)

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