Bn PROJECTS & Maison Grégoire are very pleased to invite you to the opening of
On a bien accroché, an exhibition specially conceived for the space of Maison Grégoire and revolving around the confrontation of the works of Marc Buchy and Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver.
The title of the project plays in French with the ambiguity with the expression : In an antinomic fashion to begin with, for « accrocher » means in French to hang (a picture) and there will hardly be anything hung on the walls for this project, which will mostly present immaterial protocol-based body of work.
But the expression also means in French on a metaphoric level, « we got along well », thus implying the idea of potential and spontaneous affinities existing between these two artists, at first sight very different.
One of the stakes of the project was indeed to confront these two artists from two different generations and continents, but whose bodies of work articulate around conceptual and often immaterial protocols, incarnated./activated in their respective bodies and minds.
The work of Shuzo Azuchi a.k.a. Gulliver, one of the major exponents of Japanese Fluxus, is mainly articulated around a mediated strategy of expansion and spreading of his vital energy, DNA and body material in the space he shares with the beholder.
Specifically and radically « generous », but also situating itself between semi-liturgical rites of transmission, an attitude of creative hubris, or an attempt at infiltrating or conquering spaces of mediated immortality, the physical and mental beings of Gulliver often stand in the limelight of his installations, performances, drawings, and form literally the first material – analyzed, translated, or even dismembered – of his body of work.
For this project, we will activate, in a specific and performative way, one of the most emblematic and seminal works in his production, the « body Project », a protocol whereby Gulliver organizes in a carefully-planned contractual fashion the gift and transmission of his body, dismembered into 80 parts.
Besides recent works specially created for the show, we will also activate in a novel way, his « Weight project » (consisting of the installation of a sculptural element of a weight corresponding to that of the artist), just as we will try and spread the transcription of his DNA in an integrated way throughout the domestic space of Maison Grégoire.
On his side, the work of the Brussels-based young French artist Marc Buchy, which often operates in stealth-like mode, acts as a sort of spanner in the works, disrupting the perfectly oiled mechanics of the contexts where he intervenes.
Discrete, infra-visible and anti-spectacular, his works may at first sight seem far from those of Shuzo Azuchi.
Nevertheless, on closer inspection, there are several points of convergence between the two: Questioning the very concepts of transmission and circulation (whether it be of knowledge, values, or of what specifically makes an artwork), their effectiveness and relevancy or, a contrario, their uselessness, Buchy’s works only find their implementation in relation with the body or the mind which imagined them, that is Marc’s.
A work such as « Naevius », whereby Marc Buchy had a very naturalistic naevius tattooed on his back, which he offers for sale, thus making its potential buyer the owner of a drawn part of his body, offers a good significant counterpoint to to Azuchi’s Body project. In this case though, the collector will only be able to contemplate and or exhibit his artwork by inviting Marc Buchy, and as long as the artist is alive of course.
To illustrate a similar counterpoint, we could compare Shuzo Azuchi « Gift projects » whereby he commits himself – as he will do for « On a bien accroché » – , to gift to the willing visitors a given Japanese phoneme (in the present case, « yo »), whenever he will pronounce it from now on, with Buchy’s « Instructions » protocol.
In this project, Buchy sells to a collector the promise never to take astronomy courses or dance lessons for the rest of his life.
The question of the acquisition or, conversely, of the hindrance of knowledge, that of the relevancy or utility of cognitive commitments, are central in Buchy’s practice: Over the past years he has been pursuing an attempt at drawing freehand or, rather, in a free-arm fashion, a perfect circle.
For « On a bien accroché », he is initiating a protocol where he will invite the curator of the show, or even the visitors, to try and use their « wrong » hand for different compositional or writing exercises.
A performance that will not be announced and will probably remain unnoticed during the opening will be further activated in stealth mode by two young artists who have spent a significant amount of time during the preparation of the show with Buchy: the idea was to invite them to observe him, so as to reproduce, in an integrated way, his body language and expressions.
Besides these individual projects, which operate towards each other as echoes in affinity or dissonance, « On a bien accroché » will also promote and activate a strategy of interpenetration and cross-pollination of Shuzo azuchi’s and Marc Buchy’s respective practices and singular projects, whether it be in the physical space or the communication of the exhibition.
Emmanuel Lambion
Special Previews on Sat. 21/4 and Sun 22/4/2018, on the occasion of Art Brussels
Vernissage on Sat. 28 April 2018, 3-7 p.m.
Exhibition open on Saturdays, 2-6 p.m. and by appointment
From 21 April until 16 June 2018
Maison Grégoire
292 Dieweg
B 1180 Bruxelles
www.bnprojects.be
With the support of
Art Brussels, Brussels
&
Tatjana Pieters, Gent
SAGYO, Tokyo
Maria Rosa Pividori, Milano
L’Escaut Architectures & Bn PROJECTS are very pleased to invite you to the opening of Just for a drop, an exhibition by Alberto Scodro, specially conceived for the space of L’Escaut.
Vitalist, often organic, aiming at an ecological aesthetic and an economy of the means and materials of production, circular and involutionary, confining to self-sufficiency, the work of Alberto Scodro aspires to transcend and even generate its own creative matter.
It is also a work that tells about flow and circulation, transformation and mutation. Oscillating between hubris and modesty, it unfolds by engaging a dialectic between the different tensions it generates or allows us to see: between the organic and the mineral, the industrial and the artifact, the vertical and the horizontal, control and surrender…
All these elements are found in the installation specifically designed for the site of L’Escaut Architectures, cooperative of architects founded by Olivier Bastin in 1989.
Scodro’s aesthetic universe finds its root in his family origins and the environment where he grew up and keeps developing his work today: Nove, a village of this prosperous Veneto, a few kilometers away from Bassano del Grappa, a village with a rich agrarian past, with a historical tradition of ceramics industries and workshops. Alberto Scodro draws his inspiration from it, revitalizing himself while working in a workshop he has entirely designed, organized around the crucible of a ceramic kiln. It is this oven that cooks, transforms and transmutes in a quasi-demiurgical way the objects that Scodro melts according to his own formula, and where the mineral mixes with the organic and the industrial.
Alberto Scodro responded to L’Escaut’s invitation to conceive a work for their site with a radical proposal: to completely divert the circuit from the circulation of central heating, transforming the building – the time of an exhibition – similarly to a gigantic architectural coffee machine acting both, metaphorically and efficiently, on a series of pre-baked plates made out of melted sand and mineral. This proposal was made, intuition or premonitory coincidence, before learning about that at the time L’Escaut had been transformed into a warehouse to store coffee…
His intervention brings the entire building into a vertical tension, apprehending it as a living organism from which it would divert the vital fluid and redirect it towards a new production, generating a new experience.
Contrasting with the horizontality of the ground floor display, this vertical hijacking transforming the former hoist of the warehouse into a “sculptural shower” finds an acoustic counterpoint in the air vent located at the back of the building which Scodro uses as a vector for broadcasting recordings made on site, referring to the circulation of the users of the site.
On the first floor, the forest of radiators translated in order to prepare for the drop in percolation responds to the upward momentum suggested by the ginkgos bilobas, the trees that Scodro cultivates in his country, and which have been carefully potted in patched terracotta vases previously used to melt the sculptures displayed on the ground floor.
One of these ginkgos, prehistoric tree also known for its qualities of vasodilator/fluidifier of blood circulation, is planted in the middle of the courtyard and will remain at L’Escaut where it will quietly pursue its growth.
A final note about these sculptural fusions which resort to a variety of raw materials, from more or less recognizable mundane objects or waste from our industrial societies to semi-precious ores, to which Scodro gives a new life and new radiance.
Composites, both organic and industrial in their constituents, these fusions crystallize this dialectic aspiration which runs through the work of Scodro and structures his commitment both on an artistic and socio-political level: this belief in the possibility to assimilate, metabolize, literally and figuratively, the rejection and the precious, the rare and the innocuous, the mineral and the organic, in order to make it, beyond the intriguing aesthetic forms revealed by his sculptures, the promise of a possible future, an a
llegory of a planet hopefully able to reinvent itself.
Vernissage on Thursday 19 April 2018, 3-10 p.m.
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Special Previews on Sat. 21and Sun. 22 April 2018, on the occasion of Art Brussels, 2-8 pm
Exhibition open on Saturdays and Sundays, 2-8 p.m. and by appointment
From 19 April until 2 June 2018
L’Escaut Architectures
60 rue de l’Escaut
B 1080 Brussels
www.lescaut.org
www.bnprojects.be