NYAB Event - Marc Desgrandchamps Exhibition

Marc Desgrandchamps Exhibition

Zürcher Gallery

This event has ended.

Zürcher Studio presents a solo exhibition of French painter Marc Desgrandchamps most recent works. It will be his second solo show here in New York at Zürcher. Marc Desgrandchamps has been shipping an oeuvre whose complex compositions comprise scenes witnessed, personal memories and quotations from painting and the cinema. His pictures are like time-fragments, snatches of life saved from oblivion in which interplay of transparency and colors, with the presence of unexpected objects and situations. The picture thus becomes the point of an eclectic convergence of the observed and the known, of memory and the imagination.

Desgrandchamps’ compositional inspiration comes from pictures found in magazines, things that had caught his eye in his own photographs, and stills from movies; Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, Chris Marker’s La Jetee, Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence and Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime je t’aime. This influence can be seen in the artist’s use of the polyptych, and his description of the space between the canvases as “clean cuts,” an expression that makes us think of the term “cut” in movie-making. He terms these finds “visual stimuli” and uses them as readymades to be appropriated. The outcome of this way of working is distancing and subsequent objectivisation: these pictures are not literal transcriptions, but “a jumbled, jerky, fragmented perception of reality.”

Despite its seeming coolness, Marc Desgrandchamps’ painting abounds in elements deeply rooted in his unconscious. Sometimes totally unrelated objects are found together in the same picture. Each picture is made up of successive layers, a technique he enhances by his use of transparency. Free of all linear narrative, each painting is like a light-sensitive plate, with autobiographical moments rising to the surface under the influences of an involuntary---perhaps Proustian---memory, what Desgrandchamps calls “the partial survival of a phenomenon after its caused has vanished.”