Lito S. Freeman and Benoît Maire “Proposition”
Room East
This event has ended.
Proposition, artifact, chance. These are leitmotifs of the conversation between Lito S. Freeman and Benoît Maire. Both artists have found object-based work on view in the upper gallery, while a 17-minute video by Maire plays on a loop downstairs.
Benoît Maire’s sculptures are philosophical conjectures, assemblages of wood, stone, and various found materials. His work is more ephemeral in nature than the history of sculpture is accustomed to, and yet the works are rooted in iconography and stasis, two of the medium’s core values. Resting on pedestals, with one placed on the parapet of the staircase, the four sculptures emanate quiet repose. From Dadaist poetics of language and the surreal, fragmented juxtapositions of Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, to the playfulness of Fischli and Weiss Equilibres they are radicands being calculated under our gaze: a hand that is separated from the shell it desires, a pot precariously resting upon a tree limb with words scrawled on its surface, an old, stained Bordeaux crate in which a slice of an antique head rests, a slab of petrified wood with a halo of spray paint and a domino. They are games we will never know, subjects that resist fixed interpretation.
Lito S. Freeman’s paintings are made from the humblest of means, the essentials of painting, in the form of a flotsam of scrap wood and pigment or varnish with the ghostly line of his pencil signatures on verso. Little is known about the Argentinian-born Freeman, whose life was cut short at the age of 27. Vincent Honoré curated his work into a group show at the Fondation Hippocrène in 2014, and subsequently there has been a sustained interest in his practice in Europe. His work is reminiscent of the diminutive wall sculpture of the late Bill Walton, the painted shards of Brice Marden’s marble work, and even the skinny ‘zips’ of Barnett Newman. Yet they are anti-heroic, more akin to a folk tradition than to the modernist cannon.
On continuous loop in the lower gallery is Letre, 2015, a film conversation between philosophers François Laruelle and Anne-Françoise Schmid. The title of the video elides the words lettre, or letter, and l’être, or being. Their dialogue investigates the philosophical nature of objects, and directly engages the presentation upstairs. Laruelle, who is among the most eminent living philosophers, is renowned for his writings on art and ‘non-philosophy’ and has authored over twenty books in his career. Their conversation takes place in a darkened room at a table topped with a slab of marble. It is an unscripted dialogue that ponders the nature of the objects set out before them, all of which are objects and artworks from Maire’s Paris atelier.
LITO S. FREEMAN was born in 1987 in Buenos Aires, where he completed a double degree in mathematics and literature before starting a series of minimal paintings following the tradition of Robert Ryman. “Le musée d’une nuit (script for leaving traces)” at the Fondation Hippocrène was his first public exhibition. Freeman paints on pieces of elm, which he either cut from a tree, or found. Though the circumstances are unknown, he died in 2014.
Born in 1978 in Pessac, BENOÎT MAIRE, is a graduate of the Villa Arson, Nice and of the Sorbonne, Paris 1. Recents solo exhibitions include “George Slays the Dragon” Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld in 2016; “Nuages Indexés,” Onestar Press, Paris in 2015; “Letre,” La verrière Hermès, Brussels in 2014; “Spiaggia di Menzogne,” Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; “Weapon,” David Roberts Art Foundation, London in 2013. He has had film screenings at Tate Modern, London; Palais de Tokyo, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Recents publications include The Object of Criticism, Roma Publications; Benoît Maire, Drawing Room Confessions, which was published by Mousse.
Media
Schedule
from June 09, 2016 to July 09, 2016