Exo Exo, Paris – Suddenly this overview

Suddenly this overview
Balkis island…, Glen Baxter, Sophie de Bayser, Romain Cattenoz, Matthieu Cossé, Corentin Grossmann, Hendrik Hegray, Sophie Lamm, Plonk & Replonk

curated by La KGM
Exo Exo, Paris
May 14 - May 21, 2014

press release

Suddenly this Overview, 2014
Exhibition view, Exo Exo, Paris

Sophie Lamm, La partition n’est pas la musique, 2013
Mixed techniques on wood

Glen Baxter, Sans titre, 2010
Ink and coloured pencil on paper

Suddenly this Overview, 2014
Exhibition view, Exo Exo, Paris

Glen Baxter, Sans titre, 2007
Ink and coloured pencil on paper

Suddenly this Overview, 2014
Exhibition view, Exo Exo, Paris

Hendrik Hegray, Sans titre 1 & 2, 2009
Ink on paper

From 1981 to 2005, Peter Fischli and David Weiss started a body of work they pursued alongside their other series and productions. Composed of more than 200 small clay sculptures, "Suddenly this Overview" describes in a fragmentary, elliptical and humorous way some states of the world. Great historical moments are observed through the wrong end of the telescope and simple objects such as a brick or an ashtray are introduced in all their material reflexivity. The coexistence of these different levels produces a paradoxal effect of encyclopedic truth.

Using this narrative pattern and supplying its universality with triviality and ellipse, the exhibition "Suddenly this Overwiew" intends to present a selection of drawn landscapes by some contemporaries, involving the encounter of geographical evocations and funny twists.

The history landscape painting is well known : after a gradual onset, almost underground, in the background of religious scenes from the Middle Ages, what started of as an excuse gained importance until it shaded the main subject of the works. To avoid unfair competition, the place which will be assigned to him is often limited to a window frame, locking the seduction of the anecdote into the hermetic outlines of a closed universe. Then rejected from the categories of noble genre, landscape representation is still gradually becoming one of the privileged means of expression for atmospheric feeling and Sublime in art. At the turn of the twentieth century, working on pattern, real or supposed guarantee of artistic authenticity, makes landscape a recurring motive and therefore one of the major media of the development of new artistic forms.

Despite and for these reasons, in the adventure of riding and reading the world that drawing can be, the landscape is certainly one of the first impulses of the illustrator, besides nude or still life, almost the absolute commonplace. The artists of "Suddenly this Overwiew" confront with it and all of their work is intended as an invitation to wander, to experience the pleasure of the arbitrariness of the "point of view".