Paris Internationale premiered last year in line with FIAC, and it proved the be the most dynamic and exciting of the many independent fairs happening over the week. This year it returns to 51 Avenue d’Iéna—a four storey mansion which will host 54 galleries and 7 project spaces.
Paris Internationale is a gallery-led fair, and Antoine Levi is one of five founding galleries—also including Crèvecoeur, High Art, Sultana and Gregor Staiger. They will show a group exhibit of work from the late Italian artist Luigi Ghirri and three artists born in the 1980s; Californian Sean Townley, Latvian Ola Vasiljeva and British artist Zoe Williams. Ghirri, primarily a photographer, worked with a palette which compliments the younger artists’ pieces well, dreamy blues and sandy tones dominating images which perfectly mix escapism with the everyday. Zoe Williams’s paintings, sculptures and photographs have a similar sense of calm to them, though they often (not always) contain erotic or surreal material. Vasiljeva’s works can be physically delicate—including her intricate paper cutouts—in contrast to Sean Townley’s pieces, which, though sometimes giving the impression of liquid or fragile qualities, are rendered in sturdy materials such as carbon fibre, concrete and steel.
Los Angeles’s Chateau Shatto will focus on works from the late 1990s, with a dual show from Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong and French philosopher and artist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007). The era represents the later years of Baudrillard’s life, whose photographs were often devoid of the human form, instead focusing on casual scenes from his life and travels; hints at documentary form, yet often not holding the strictly informative data one might expect. Alongside this, Jacqueline De Jong’s more overtly unsettling paintings feel both entirely different and oddly reminiscent of Baudrillard’s works, a blood red wash here and a hint of the unknown there.
This will be the international premiere of young London-based artist Dickon Drury, who will also have his first solo exhibition at the gallery next month. Drury graduated this year from London’s Slade School of Fine Art, and he is a former resident artist at Bristol’s Spike Island. His paintings feel utterly in line with the wider show itself—full of life and humour—with the traditional still life given an off-beat twist; whether horrified fish heads sticking upright from a pie just before consumption, or crowds of vibrant jugs depicted in a shadowy, wobbly-edged and oddly curious light.
Tokyo’s Misako & Rosen will also present a solo show, with work by Japanese artist Kaoru Arima. His paintings of human faces have been described not as singular portraits, but as a mix of slivers of many faces seen by the artist over time and concocted in full from the imagination. This manner of dissecting and creating from multiple fragments can also be considered in line with new technology and with images formed digitally, whole people created from a mishmash of faces, personas and beings.
Another of the fair’s founding galleries, Sultana will show a mixed booth of work by Pia Camil, Celia Hempton (a firm Elephant favourite) and Olivier Millagou. There is a sense of play in all three artists’ works; Hempton and Millagou employing traditional techniques in many places with a tongue in cheek—Hempton’s painted nudes are typically depicted through the contemporary vessel that is the webcam, while Millagou’s sculptures, often reminiscent of far more ancient historical artefacts, reveal their currentness with bright block colours and the occasional cheeky feature. His latest works dwell halfway between natural and manmade, stone-like ovals lined up horizontally and washed with a thick aubergine coating. Mexican artist Pia Camil fits well with this–her coloured masks, splashed with bright colour and endowed with vibrant and well-groomed locks shrink ideas of old and new together, while her brightly coloured textile works and hand stitched canvases conceal deeper political messages.
‘Paris Internationale‘ runs from 18-23 October at 51 Avenue d’Iéna
