11 | 10 | 1991 | 15 | 11 | 1991

Concept / Context - Denise René Gallery

Paris, France

“Architecture, a projection of the spirit and a protection for the body, is the result of a lengthy work.

Indeed, from the order to the completion, many years or even decades will pass.

However, the entire construction process of a building depends on an encounter, sometimes striking, between a concept and a context, between an idea and a place.

This “great moment”, this sensitive meeting, is nothing but emotion.

The works that mark the opening of the Denise René Gallery aim at highlighting this “fragment of freedom” taken from the slow process of creating buildings.

To do this, we used retail objects, elements taken from industry, finished products, since the courageous craftsmen who transformed and modelled the materials in the building site are no longer part of our contemporary world.

Therefore, through a collection of materials and equipment gathered without premeditation, we selected those that constitute our intervention.

Through all operations that create relations from scattering, from tension to compression, or even repetition, we determine the organization system between the different elements. This intervention becomes an installation when it is confronted to its implantation site.

The tension will thus increase, the repetition will adjust itself, the scattering will settle, so that the exchange of energies takes place, from the environment to the building and from the building to the environment and in the end no one will know which one of them needed more this new identity.

When watching the work from afar, the amateur will distinguish only an object placed on a black canvas. This solitary emergence changes meaning when he/she gets closer and discover under the canvas the depth of an aerial image, then, with particular attention, the reading of the place becomes clear: river, road, fragment of the city, forest, mountain, placing the object in a context.

The simplicity that one thought to have seen, the minimalism that one thought had understood, all fade away and give place to a more complex feeling, denser, broader, which points to the uncertain and in which its apparent confusion and incredible chaos force us to find within ourselves the strength to look at the world differently.”

Dominique Perrault, September 26th, 1991

Simultaneous presentation of two exhibitions on Dominique Perrault in the two Denise René galleries. “Studies for the BnF” was featured in the left bank gallery, whereas “Concept/Context” was presented in the right bank gallery. The latter was a new exhibition space designed by Perrault; the exhibition thus marked its opening.

Excerpt from the press release

“Opening a new art gallery dedicated to painting by exhibiting an architect may surprise, and yet this choice fits perfectly in the logic of Geometric Abstraction for which my gallery has made itself the haven since its creation.

Ever since 1917, the Suprematism stated its vision of painting and Malevitch translated this aspiration in his architectones. The other masters of Suprematism and Constructivism such as Lissitsky and Tatlin have elaborated major architectural projects. According to them, the architects Gropius and Mies van der Rohe have worked in perfect intellectual synergy with the painters and sculptors members like them of the Bauhaus. Since 1918, Auguste Herbin proclaimed for the first time in France the architectural future of painting and its mission of integration. Closer to us, close connections had appeared with Le Corbusier to whom I devoted a personal exhibition as soon as the 1950s and then again in 1971, first in Paris then New York. Other similar connections have developed with other architects from around the world: Mies van der Rohe in the USA, C.R. Villanueva in Venezuela, Bertrand Goldberg in Chicago, Marcel Breuer and I.M. Pei in New York and Paris, and so many others as Seidler in Sydney.

Dominique Perrault belongs to this intellectual lineage of creators who take part in the renewal of architecture in France. His realizations and projects testify on the larger scale to the intimate connection between the art of the painter and that of the builder. He is also, and of this I am proud, the designer of the structure and space of the new Denise René Gallery. His vision is kinetic and about transparency, which made our meeting anything but an accident, rather a necessity.”

Denise René, 1991

“Concept/Context”

Denise René Gallery, right bank, Paris

October 11th – November 25th, 1991

“Studies for the BnF”

Denise René Gallery, left bank, Paris

October 11th – November 15th, 1991