Dear Galerie Charron faithful,
Easter 🐥 is the festival of all temptations! This is not the time to deprive ourselves! What could I wish you better than a beautiful spring sun, relaxation and a gourmet feast surrounded by your loved ones? A nice program that I will try to implement as well. For Easter time, 😉 I’m pleased to present the paintings of Céline Achour, who received 8 prizes in painting and 3 prizes in illustration.
Happy Easter !
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“Has the world ever been changed other than by the word and its magical medium: the word? “Thomas Mann
“There are men and women who, through their speeches, changed the world: Martin Luther King, Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Nelson Mandela, J.F. Kennedy, Churchill, … There are moments in the History of Mankind when a speech marks an era, becomes its emblem, a motor of dreams and hope, speaks to the heart and mind, and draws a better future. There are also others which are only addressed to dead, terrible souls, where simplifying truths authorising killing dominate.
Mantras, a corpus of sculptures embodying the emblematic words of modern history, questions the power of these words and questions the performative quality of political discourse.
If words are devoid of power, what is the point of prohibiting, burning books, formatting language and constraining thought? If words were not weapons, there would be no need to silence those whose words worry, exasperate with rage and hatred, the enemies of freedom and truth, the oppressors, the men in the shadows.
Originally a Mantra, a Sanskrit word meaning “instrument of thought”, is a “sacred formula of Brahmanism which has, associated with certain rites, a magical virtue”. The Mantras presented here – aerial sculptures constructed from sound spectra – are emblematic extracts from the speeches of the men and women who have forged modern history through the power of words”.
Here are some excerpts:
“With the support of the Berlin Senate and the Cultural Foundation of the Federal States, the Berlin City Museum has acquired the archive of the photographer Manfred Hamm. What a boon for Berlin” was the headline of Ingeborg Ruthe in the newspaper “Berliner Zeitung” on 10.11.2020. This news has been the subject of numerous articles in all German print and radio media this week. But why such a craze? This recognition is not new; the German newspaper Der Spiegel already saw in Manfred Hamm, I quote the “Pioneer and Master of Architectural Photography”.
On the French side, during our two gallery exhibitions in 2017, Manfred Hamm’s photographs on the famous Bibiothèques, Concert Halls and Stock Exchanges and in the second part on the Berlin Wall, the press was not modest with notably this article published in the specialised magazine “l’oeil de la photographie” (see article).
But who is Manfred Hamm? He was born in 1944 near Zwickau in Germany. In 1955, he fled with his mother to the West, and that’s how he began to walk the streets of West Berlin, his adopted city or “the theatre of the absurd wall”, as he called it. It was thanks to his shots of industrial buildings that looked like clichés of contemporary archaeology in which mankind would have disappeared – nicknamed “the ancient sites of tomorrow” – that Manfred Hamm became famous.
The city of Berlin has thus acquired a unique and priceless collection of images on the history and architecture of the city photographed between 1972 and 2010. Almost 40 years of documentary and artistic photographic work with his lifelong friend, his heavy large-format camera “Plaubel PS 7/433”. It doesn’t matter for Manfred Hamm if he has to move around with heavy equipment and spend hours in front of his lens trying to capture the “T” moment, Manfred Hamm doesn’t like working with a digital camera because for him the magic doesn’t happen while his faithful Plaubel gives him an aestheticism, extreme sharpness, lighting and careful framing with breathtaking precision. .such as a focus on the bowels of the buildings, allowing a renewed vision of architecture, highlighting the internal structure of the premises, with an aesthetic and self-sufficient perception of architecture.
Manfred Hamm was able to capture moments of history by adding his declaration of love for the Berlin capital and his contribution to this historical upheaval by enriching the collection of the Berlin City Museum.
Gallery Charron is pleased to introduce you to the works entitled “Allegories” by the sculptor Irène Lussou. Lussou worked at first for the cinema, the theater, the fashion, the operas of Paris. In parallel with this activity, she had the opportunity to assist the sculptor Marc Boulay so she worked on animal sculpture projects, in particular for the Museum of Natural History of Paris.
Since 1996, Lussou dedicates herself exclusively to her own practice. She began with stone cutting and specialized in the creation of large format stoneware. Then she became interested in bronze and metal. Today, she works mainly in bronze and steel.
Lussou creates great feminine silhouettes with large foreheads, high cheekbones, sensual mouths and deep strange eyes, in a mixture of detachment and serenity. They occupy the space with grace and determination.
Another source of inspiration for the sculptor is the spiral which, beyond its esthetics and its elegance, has the particularity of being based on the golden section. It is a universal key to create a sculptural writing where the color comes to underline the drawing. Negative space defines the work and draws the gaze to it as a whole.
Galerie Charron is pleased to welcome the works “Hybrids” by the sculptor Bérengère d’Orsay. These creatures, at once mineral, vegetable, animal and human, remind us of the deep but often forgotten links that unite us to the different kingdoms cohabiting on our planet and to the beauty and fragility of our condition.
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Understanding contemporary art? This is obviously a good question. But the real question we must ask ourselves is: should we understand or know how to appreciate a work of art?
In fact, it is not essential to have notions of art history to love contemporary art! On the other hand, to appreciate a work of art, you have to feel it and this feeling can only develop through repetition, which is why we have launched our You Tube channel entitled “Loving contemporary art” which will present well-known and lesser-known artists during the summer of 2020.
Looking at a work of art, “not to understand or know, but to feel something” as the English painter Francis Bacon wrote. This is the magic that takes place between the work and the viewer.
A magic that even makes you fall in love, according to a study conducted by neurobiologists in London in 2012. So if art stimulates our deep and intimate emotions, we will help you to look differently, to shape your eye, by going deep inside yourself to find that little spark that will simply allow you to judge for yourself if you like contemporary art or not, or more precisely if you appreciate the work presented or not.
Every Thursday in June and July, we offer you an appointment with an artist! An artistic and instructive journey in the form of a video to share without moderation with family and friends! See you soon on Galerie Charron’s You Tube channel.