Oops
7 June - 6 september 1998
Project Room
Guest Curator : Lionel Bovier
exhibition coproduced with the elac - espace lausannois d’art contemporain, Lausanne.

John Armleder, Francis Baudevin, Robert Breer, Michael Scott, John Tremblay.

The exhibition, first of all, does not include any "canonical artist" of these movements with the exception of Robert Breer who, when setting in motion pseudo-unitary structures in the early Sixties, already rendered the Gestalt equation of Minimalism to be more complex. The work exhibited in Le Magasin in Grenoble evokes this dimension of movement within perception by confronting the spectator with a piece of cloth animated by slow and silent motors.

The title of the exhibition is derived from a series of four paintings by Francis Baudevin made especially for this occasion. The artist recycles signs, and motifs lifted from the field of commercial visual communications, that thereby, carry more or less effective optical effects. These signs are modified by the operation of erasure of all textual inscriptions and by the enlargement of the motif, and waver between their graphic origins, their role as advertising inductors and finally, their pictorial nature. As the title ‘Oops’ suggests, these works unearth one of the most repressed dimensions of optical art, namely the commercial exploitation of strong visual effects.

A sculpture by John Tremblay made especially for the show in the Magasin obstructs the exhibition space. The piece, which measures 6 by 12 metres, replays the idea of deformed targets that the artist has been working on for a number of years (thus replacing an optic or kinetic model with a ballistic one), and applying it to a model of a velodrome. The work is meant to be climbed over and modifies the perspective that the viewer may have of the other works hung on the wall.

A number of stripe paintings (both black and white and in color) by Michael Scott seem to represent a possible paradigm for a current reworking of references derived from Op’Art, in fact offer visitors a condensed version of '60's pictorial investigations. The provocation for "the response of the eye" limits itself to a brutal visual irritation and the impossibility of bringing to an end the optic vibration. This continuous effect seems to deactivate the utopia inherent in the history of kinetic art.

The exhibition also takes into account another moment of the reinvigoration of Op’Art vocabulary, i.e the appropriationist context of the 1980s, by presenting a work by John Armleder, made up of twenty-four mirrored surveillance domes. This work (dated 1997) plays with the ambiguity of its reflecting presence and restates the operations of all the works surrounding it, while simultaneously conveying the appropriationist attitude of the artist. This attitude is conveyed by the juxtaposition of the domes in a dot motif, reminiscient of many paintings of the previous decade.

BIOGRAPHY
John Armleder, born 1948. Lives and works in Geneva.
Francis Baudevin, born 1964. Lives and works in Geneva.
Robert Breer, born 1926. Lives and works in New York.
Michael Scott, born 1955. Lives and works in New York.
John Tremblay, born 1966. Lives and works in New York.