Art : Concept is pleased to announce Caroline Achaintre’s solo exhibition, Permanente, at Fondazione Giuliani per l’Arte Contemporanea in Rome.
Tapestry, watercolours, basketwork and ceramics are traditional techniques that Caroline Achaintre uses to create her carnival of the absurd. The exhibition reveals the wide range of her output with a group of previously unseen works as well as pieces produced especially for Montpellier. She is creating her distinctive exhibition design and making three new wicker sculptures with local artisans.
Pierre-Olivier Arnaud was born in 1972. He lives and works in Lyon.
His work is based on the image, that is to say the image as a motif but which tends to disappear. He questions the status that the images he collects can have, a status that is relatively blurry because of the very precariousness of these motifs and their identity. Perhaps this is why the artist does not define himself as a photographer, who takes an image for what it is and gives it to be seen in an immediate and literal way. On the contrary, it is with the invisible, fragile qualities of images, in their non-obviousness and in the representations and interpretations they can give rise to, that Pierre-Olivier Arnaud works with. Moving away from a concrete look at the image, he produces a multitude of often abstract motifs, almost always in black and white, blurring our established vision and “de-sublimating” the visible. The image thus dissolves “at first reducing the motif to bring us, in the next stage, to get closer to it and look at it in detail”*. The artist’s works are a somewhat dark, direct and honest vision of the world: inviting us to look at things differently, going beyond the evidence of glossy aesthetics and penetrating the identity itself of an image.
His work is featured in the following public collections: CNAP, Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris/FR; Fond National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Fonds Cantonal de Décoration et d’Art Visuel, Geneva; Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris; Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain, Paris; FRAC Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-Lès-Rouen.
Recent solo shows: Éléments, home alonE, Clermont-Ferrand (2022), Premiers Matériaux, Galerie Skopia, Geneva (2018); A Long Distance Call, Optica, Montréal/CA (2012); Lumières du jour, MAMCO, Genève/CH (2009); Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble/FR (2005).
*See the exhibition: Biens Communs III, Mamco, Geneva, cycle l’Éternel Détour, 2013
Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Dans l’espace: poussières, points, trames et chatoiements –L’image prototype, restes et promesses, textes de François Aubart et Anne Griffon-Selle, coordination éditoriale Christophe Lemaître, 2022, 184 pagesPierre-Olivier Arnaud, textes de Jill Gasparina, Mathieu Mermillon, Ed Adera, Lyon, 2009, 160 pagesPierre-Olivier Arnaud | Mirror Ball, Texte Marie de Brugerolle. Traduction Helga Kopp, éd. Institut français de Stuttgart, 2005, 80 pages
For this new exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Ulla von Brandenburg has imagined a total, evolving project, inspired from the theatre, as well as its imaginary and conventions. Around the notion of ritual, understood as the possibility to explore the relationships between individuals and groups, and to create or not to create something in common, the artist invites the public to take part in an immersive and renewed experience of the themes, forms and motifs that feed into her work: movement, the stage, colours, music, textiles…
