Our third gallery pick comes from FIAC’s endlessly appealing first floor, in the shape of San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery. Things get a little cosmic in this booth, with reflective surfaces, silver shimmers and kaleidoscopic pastel tones pulling on Elephant’s magpie-like tendencies. All that glitters, gets a thumbs up from us.
The gallery have brought six of their artists to Paris; Dashiell Manley, Sean Raspet, Hugh Scott-Douglas, Ian Wallace, Nicole Wermers and Susanne Winterling. There is a strong play on geometry in the booth, many of the artists using material as a way to explore line and form.
Washington-born Raspet is showing the visually satisfying Inflection, a maze of mirrored asymmetric forms surrounding a white coffee cup, exploring space and composition in a manner not too dissimilar to drawing. Similarly, Wermers’ Sequence #G4 forgoes colour to explore material and shape, a simple but effective wall-mounted sculpture that exists as a rectangle of white painted ceramic, its lower section sliced evenly and appearing as a set of new chalks might sticking out of the pack; some hanging full, others snapped or pinched off.
Wermers—born in Germany and currently nominated for the Turner Prize—also represents the more image-led work in the booth, her collaged Untitled (bubbles) and Untitled (Golden arch) continuing the exploration into edges and planes. These works are ambiguous yet comfortingly familiar, toying with glossy magazine aesthetics and interior forms.
In the far corner, a Dashiell Manley work explores the depth of its canvas surface. To create this work, Manley writes every word from the cover of the New York Times in coloured crayon on the canvas. This is covered with a metallic gauche wash, before the canvas is turned, and the whole process starts again. The canvas is written on a total of sixteen times, the final result being an intense crowding of letters—some fully formed, some barely visible, others existing purely as coloured dust—that is sealed with a silvery sheen.
Jessica Silverman Gallery can be found at 1.H04, FIAC, all images courtesy Jessica Silverman Gallery
