Guillaume Linard Osorio “Liquids Don’t Cry”

Carvalho Park

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CARVALHO PARK presents Liquids don’t cry, Paris-based artist Guillaume Linard Osorio’s first solo show with the gallery, and his first as a represented artist under Carvalho Park.

This new series leaves the quietly hypnotic, liquid pours of Linard Osorio’s Euphonies, exhibited at Carvalho Park in 2020, for complex, seemingly crystalline fields where the vertical is interlaced with the horizontal. Repeating a paradox by which a static quality is offset by the sensation of movement, the paintings are manifested by an adherence to the work’s architectural structure while also transcending it. Both fixed and fluid, it is through an interplay of binaries that these mesmeric compositions are at once emphatic and ungraspable.

Linard Osorio mediates the conversation of image versus object, material versus ground, as intuitively as he does theoretically. The artist proposes a field within the picture plane, a landscape between sheets of polycarbonate. Within a window-shaped format that ties the material to its architectural roots, the space inherently suggests a kind of inside-out interface. Linard Osorio renders the site a chromatic environment. Structural voids become veils of sapphire, inky green, teal, beige and blush, in liquid-like but sensitively composed images that oscillate between transparency and deep saturation. The co-presence of temporality and permanence that define Linard Osorio’s work here exists behind each semi-reflective visage, pulling you in, to look inside, to look through.

“I do not have interest in the representation of a thing, a figure. I have little regard for quotations. Culturally speaking, my work draws more from the history of architecture than the history of art. I do not feel a particular artistic affiliation. My work in painting is essentially experimental. I only focus on the support and the tool. I first put into place more or less complex protocols that lead to results. It is then a question of whether to pursue it further, or not.

My work in architecture led me to an interest in alveolar polycarbonate, a material used in the production of certain windows. In addition to its transparency and lightness, it has the particularity of having a cellular sequence, which gives it a space that can be investigated, like the void or vacuum that separates the two glasses of an insulating window. It is in this space that I work.

From my perspective, this is more about windows than paintings. We’re peering through. The images that arise from the encounter of the resins within the material in turn oscillate between the unintentional stain and the perfect trace: what I would call accidental landscapes.

The thread and reflection that filter the image, as well as the particular luminosity of the material, takes us back to the aesthetics of video screens. The sequencing of the cells has the viewer maintain a certain distance, just as a screen’s pixels scale together to form an image. Moreover, the protocols of process—from the way in which the resins are injected, the plates pressurized, to drying by forced air—refer to a certain history of mechanical printing.

I come from a generation that saw the emergence of the cell phone, PlayStation, the internet and flat screens. Perhaps in my work there is a certain nostalgia for the imagery of the 1980s. Perhaps on the contrary, or at the same time, it is a question of envisioning the end of digital images, barely born and already fading away. In any case, it is a matter of painting. Painting that I would call post-digital.”

Guillaume Linard Osorio (b. 1978, France) lives and works in Paris. The focus of his studies was architecture – he is a graduate of the École Boulle and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Malaquais. In 2021, Linard Osorio’s first institutional solo exhibition was mounted at the Forum of Urbanism and Architecture of Nice, France.

Linard Osorio’s work has been shown at MAMCO Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Geneva), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAC / VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), l’Espace Croisé Centre d’Art Contemporain (Roubaix), the Bourges Contemporary Art Biennial, Platform3 (Munich) and Bikini (Resonance program of the Lyon biennial). He has also exhibited at FRAC Bretagne, Ateliers de Rennes / Biennale d’Art Contemporain, La Maréchalerie center d’art contemporain (Versailles), HEAD (Geneva), Magasin (Grenoble), Biennale internationale de design de St Etienne, at YGREC ENSAPC (Paris), Rencontres internationales Paris / Berlin / Madrid, and at the Vasarely Foundation (Aix-en-Provence). Linard Osorio is represented by Galerie Alain Gutharc in Paris and by Carvalho Park in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of FRAC Bretagne (Régional Fund of Contemporary Art of Brittany, France.