Straddle the Line Between Form and Function is the full name of Paris-based Galerie Jérôme Pauchant’s latest group show. The work exhibited tiptoes the line between use and uselessness, beauty and crudeness, art and the everyday.
The exhibition does not just to make a point of the differences between these ideas, but suggests ‘transformations’ present in these works that allow them to bridge rather than sit in one camp or other. None of the works appear as a very simple metaphor, there are complications and depths to all of them. These six very youthful artists (all born in the 1980s or 90s bar one) wish to allow their objects to ‘mobilize and generate worlds’ as they ‘decline to banality’.
There is a mix of wall hung work and sculpture, and many of the pieces cross between media and art forms. Loup Sarion’s scuffed and greying gym bag — that would once have been vibrant yellow — sits lump-like on the floor, simply sculptural, yet also suggestive of narrative, use and history. Across the room a second messed up gym bag is dwarfed by an enormous, digitally printed flag that looms above, its printed bright purple and red cloudscape covered in droplets of digital water, its crystal clear definition and surface ‘cleanness’ antithetical to the bleak, saggy bag sitting at its base.
There is also Irina Lotarevich’s strangely appealing Untitled, which consists of cross sections of toolboxes filled with a marbled liquid that turns out to be stagnant water, beauty products and Listerine. These are pretty yummy looking despite their grubbiness. Hadrien Gerenton’s fragile looking rusty coloured box, its’ ‘this end up’ warning turned the wrong way also captures a mix of battered wear and appealing smoothness.
Also showing are Loup Sarion, Julien Meert, Rachel Koolen and Micah Hesse.
Straddle the Line Between Form and Function is open at Galerie Jérôme Pauchant until July 25.
