NYAB Event - Briac Leprêtre "Like It Is"

Briac Leprêtre "Like It Is"

Parker's Box

This event has ended.

This exhibition is the first part of an exchange with 40mcube, an alternative exhibition space in Rennes, France, which will subsequently see Parker’s Box artist, Steven Brower realize a solo project there in 2012.

Briac Leprêtre produces series of watercolors depicting banal scenes, and in parallel he makes sculptures that refer to the volumes and shapes of architecture. Those indications of somewhat conventional and familiar practices slide away on first encounters with the artist’s work, perhaps to be replaced by a mildly troubling sensation that what is in front of us is exactly what it looks like, but that it is somehow posing as something else. The often visited notion of the surrogate in contemporary art practice begins to stir here, but Briac Leprêtre’s work goes beyond this too, focusing its attentions and research around the prickly question of where the art really is, or perhaps where it begins and ends.

In relation to ideas about the status and presence of art works, Briac Leprêtre is something of an acrobat, a tightrope walker even, as his preferred arena of practice resolutely situates itself in an exploration of the familiar with a view to nudging it discreetly over the razor’s edge into subtle and possibly unchartered territories. Indeed the subtlety of his transformations of things is such that their active ingredients might creep up on some unsuspecting individuals with a degree of insidiousness. Other viewers may remain indifferent or even oblivious to the artist’s meticulous labors and obsessions, and the difficulty of deciding which of these reactions is the exception that proves the rule, bears witness to the tightrope that Briac Leprêtre has deliberately chosen to tread, but also to the rarefied nature of the context towards which he beckons us.

In LIKE IT IS, Briac Leprêtre presents a large, site-specific sculpture that appears to be an essential structural part of the gallery’s architecture. Accompanying this work, are a group of smaller objects cast in concrete, a series of framed watercolors, and what technically is a wall painting.

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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