For its fifteenth exhibition La Tannerie proposes to pause in the incessant flow of information that our modern societies produce, to counterbalance the often contradictory injunctions of which we are the spectators or the targets.
SIECLE invites us to slow down, to re-tame a rhythm or a pulse that would be proper to us, to take the time, to find it, to re-appreciate its particular flavor, to reclaim it, excluding the notions of precipitation, imperative or urgent.
The word “century”, the title of our exhibition, does not define the one-hundred-year period that we all know, but etymologically denotes the temporality of life in contrast with the celestial and eternal time of death.
SIECLE highlights contemporary artists whose duration is the issue and the main material of their research: temporality of the gaze, temporality of the matter, or organic temporality of the artist. Our exhibition reveals a tiny part of the creative excitement they display when they question chronology, periodicity, sequencing, permanence, rhythm or even erosion.
If all the works presented here are de facto resulting from a process testifying to an anteriority, the exhibition will move away from the strict field of the memory, to open it to the concept of dynamics, whose time and the duration are by essence the phenomenon.
Whether painting, questioning the look time and how the eye constructs or deconstructs perception when faced with a pictorial object, whether it is monochrome when time alters the density color and is a game and an aesthetic challenge, or that it is music whose sound material is absent, or on the contrary expands in proportions still unheard of, or even sculpture whose time is a building material in itself, each work presented here shows the many concerns that artists of our time are seizing.
It is amazing to see how much this issue is going through creation today. How artists seize them and open fields of experimentation and new perspectives. The exhibition is a snapshot, a non-exhaustive proposition of the paths that artists take or take to make this notion their first concern.
To the finished object, completed, inert and often presented as an end in the exhibition, SIECLE opposes here works that testify more about the process and the path. With the exception of a few pieces, the works no longer belong to the register of completion but to that of the testimony, the reflection phase, a stage, or a process. The status of the work is thus modified. It will notably question the idea of ​​sequencing, periodicity and fragmentation as a support or system of
The singularity of the exhibits also leads to questioning the context of the exhibition as a space in which the usual gaze codes can be deported. Here the exhibition is no longer the seat of sanctuary works, but becomes a laboratory in which they are always built, modified, prolonged or altered in time.
SIECLE attempts a synthesis between the workshop and the exhibition by highlighting works that reject the dichotomy between elaboration time and observation time, and that open a perspective in which each finds its own beat and generates a time that frees him from the gesture that conceived him.
We therefore invite you, no doubt, less to observe them, than to discover, to unify and to harmonize a rhythm that would be comon to all of you.