There was plenty of other art activity to catch in Paris during the Paris Art Week (Art Basel week). There are more and more commercial galleries in the city, major auctions took place, and significant institutional shows included big surveys of Surrealism at the Pompidou, Arte Povera at the Pinault Collection, and Pop at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. There was also a better range of subsidiary fairs than Frieze London can boast: I heard good things about ‘Art Asia’ and the twentieth-century ‘Moderne’, and caught two fairs made up of younger, edgier galleries. Both ‘Paris Internationale’ and ‘The Salon by Nada and The Community’ were well-located presentations with a sprinkling of established names and a lively mix of upcoming artists.
Paris Internationale has been running for ten years, initially as a complement to Art Basel Paris’ predecessor, FIAC. The 75 participants benefited from an unusually spacious layout for an alternative fair.
Roberto Jaurez: ‘Phone Sex’, 1984 at APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia
Roberto Jaurez was a friend of Basquiat in downtown New York during the creative format of the 1980’s, and exhibited widely at the time. Going through his crates during the pandemic, Juarez came across his expressive, painterly drawings from the time, and felt their energy, leading him to shown them again. The striking ‘Phone Sex’, 1984, has a chastening backstory, referring to the AIDS-driven search for safer means of interaction. A figure that could equally be an Aztec sculpture sits on a sofa as he strokes an exaggerated phallus. Beside him is a phone of the time, the sound of which is visually represented in a move that brings to mind the sexual sub-text of Anita Ward’s song ‘Ring My Bell’, a frequent airwave presence at the time.
Dan Mitchell: ‘Piccadilly’, 2024, at Bel Ami, Los Angeles.
Marker pen, somewhat surprisingly, obsessively recreates 1970’s cigarette adverts without the advertorial text – sort of nostalgic, but shown alongside posters containing mockingly bad advice comparable to encouraging smoking.
Joseph Strau: ‘True Regrets might appear as showers in the evening sky’, 2024, at House of Gaga – Mexico City / Guadalajara / Los Angeles
Tinfoil is the Austrian artist’s signature material, here it provides the wrapping for real and fake gemstones on his return to Vienna after thirty years in New York: missing his former life, he felt like an alien and his thoughts turned to space and the matter we come from…
Raphaela Vogel: ‘I’m waiting for my woman’ at Gregor Staiger, Zurich
Several partial casts from old-fashioned radiators made up an animal herd, translated from thermoplastic to bronze, drips standing in for ribs. Witty, though I couldn’t quite deduce the sex-tweaked connection to Lou Reed waiting for his man.
Ignacio Gatica: ‘Sunset Paris’, 2024 at Von Amon Co, Washington DC
Referring to how Pinochet broke the Chilean economy, this tracks the Parisian sun in real time as it moves through a landscape with each colour representing a metal, and the extent of it reflecting the current price of the commodity.
The Salon by Nada and The Community, in its debut year, had 50 galleries with a good balance between Europe and America.
Pope L: ‘Page or Maybe John Berryman’ at 52 Walker and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
AN impressive survey of the late Pope L (1955-2023) included a set of eight ‘Eraser paintings’ from 2021. They are each made on boxes of a dozen Blick art erasers, assembled as grids that become both the material and substrate of the work, the rubbers being dug into and painted on. The ‘little bastards’ , as Pope L called them, were made in response to Robert Ryman and his relationship with material, process and scale – also, perhaps, mocking his career-long emphasis on white in the context of Pope L dealing with issues related to being black in many of his works. Thus the abstracted compositions of text, landscape and assemblage are completed by a signing of Ryman’s name. ‘Page or Maybe John Berryman’ exploits the fact that ‘R.Ryman’ is hidden within the name of the poet John Berryman. It also features a US chemist’s sign, perhaps alluding to the treatments required for Berryman’s notorious alcoholism.
My other favourites, a similar tendency towards imaginative materials, were:
Deondre Davis: ‘Untitled’ 2024 at Et al., San Francisco.
The combination of false eyelashes with various found fixings suggest the works looking back at us, as well as confusing what is the work and what its means of attachment.
Shary Boyle: ‘Silencers’, 2024 at Patel Brown, Toronto.
Fresh from a Dutch residency, the 2013 Canadian Venice Biennale artist uses pigmented stoneware and porcelain eyes to give character to heads calling attention to the repression of female voices.
Greg Carideo at Foreign & Domestic, New York.
Found T-shirts are structured as awnings to form a mask-come-architecture (maskitecture?) with detail provided by a lost heel collected from the street.
Marco Bizzarri at Night Café, London.
Visibility is restrained in abandoned Chilean desert buildings are sandily painted without sand, the top layer being of remarkably precisely-flicked flecks of paint.
Kaare Ruud: ‘Untitled Chair Sculptures’, 2024, at Hulias, Oslo.
Hairy chairs? No, the Norwegian artist found some plastic chairs trashed into fragmentation, and reunited the fragments by sewing them together with electrician’s cable.
