GALERIE LES FILLES DU CALVAIRE

The gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Ismaïl Bahri. For the past ten years this artist has been living between Paris and Tunis. He creates a singular universe by mixing oriental culture with philosophical and conceptual European references. The formal base of his work questions artistic problems.
His universe is very distinctive; because of the finesse of his work and a kind of poetry which is expressed just as well through drawings and installations as through videos and photography.
Generally, artists create pictures, but it would be tempting to say that Ismaïl Bahri develops those images in a photographic way. He creates forms; he makes them appear. Nothing is frozen in his works that show apparitions, undulations, changes or the instability of moments.
He sees his artistic research as an experiment that frequently reveals itself as a simple action towards matter.
First, the artist has an intuition and observes a phenomenon which he then attempts to explore and amplify so that a protocol can be established. These phenomenons are varied and fleeting. Prints, reflections and vibrations of little things, bound and fragile, that he captures through the medium of his choice.
The renditions are about on-look and the make up of pictures: the film Orientations shows the artist wandering around an area of Tunis, a beaker of ink in hand, looking to capture images of the town. He doesn't ask us to look at the town but to focus on its reflection forming on the surface of the ink. It is his way of offering an indirect vision, fragmented and subjective, of the landscape in which he evolves. This suggestion surprises because its implementation is so simple yet it manages to conjure a clear conceptual dimension.
The artist uses basic and ordinary materials: fluids (water, ink, milk), fluid retainers (cups, basins, baths) and structural elements such as string. As simple as it may be, each material portrays an array of possibilities which can then be explored in their propensity to create phenomenons. These phenomenons then become shapes. It requires great precision, and as such, Ismaïl Bahri works very slowly and in series. He is obsessional, because repetition is necessary given how meticulous the experience is. The artist's moves are bait to which the material can react in a way that is sometimes more accidental than others. This allows for potential deviations. The artist would undoubtedly be described as a tightrope walker if he was to be compared to a circus performer. He shows everything without pretence. He doesn’t hide the quivers, the delicacies, or the potential overturn.
Similarly, the pictures are so instant that they gain a magical quality. In his video Attraction the artist's hands juggle delicate light. Resembling those of a mimic, the hands pretend to manipulate this light, acting as if they can make it emerge or disappear at will.
Reality is almost magical in the works of Ismaïl Bahri and, despite a strict minimalist trend, we are far removed from daily aesthetics. Each piece of art has a relationship with the world that is conveyed in a way much more complex than originally anticipated. This connection is intimate at times, especially when he uses bodies as a canvas for mysterious landscapes. He creates imaginary maps as he lets ink filter into the pores and the folds of the skin (Sang d'encre, Ink blood, photography series, 2009). In a more recent piece, a drop of water is placed onto a body appearing sporadically in the frame. The drop vibrates to the rhythm of the pulse, thus capturing our attention as we breathlessly anticipate it becoming a trickle of water.
We could think that the practice of Ismaïl Bahri is shielded from the boisterous world, almost as if it were celestial. On the contrary, by getting as close as possible to intimacies, details, trivialities, Ismaïl Bahri offers a 'real' view. As such, he forces us to look at reality but with a slant, from a certain distance. In a way more favourable to the creation of hypotheses and to the rise of a singular aesthetic rather than to grandiloquence.

Translated by Demelza Desforges

With the support of the  Centre national des arts plastiques (help to the first exhibition), Ministry of Culture and Communication.

Defying artistic categories, Joris van de Moortel’s work can be described as sculptural, architectural, performative, musical, pictorial, or even pertaining to the installation art genre.
Similarly, various historical references are encompassed in his practice. But they are portrayed indirectly, through subverted art forms. In that way, young Flemish artist Joris van de Moortel is iconoclastic. When he is doing a residency, he turns his studio space (or studiolo) into a Merzbau by creating a temporary workshop inside it. It becomes a sort of stage on and in which he can perform all kinds of activities. He shows that space, and at the end of the exhibition he dismantles and cuts up the architecture-come-installation subject into different pieces which he takes elsewhere. They can, of course, be made up of ‘real art pieces’ created on location, but they can also be walls, doors, or windows within the workspace which he turns into sculptural elements. The artist then rearranges these, or other residual components, in other exhibition spaces where they morph into just as many categorical pieces of work.
To get a sneak preview of this exhibition, the gallery invited Joris van de Moortel over last October to create a monumental piece which was shown during Pearls of the North, a group exhibition of artists from the Benelux countries who had been put forward by various galleries. For that event, the artist offered to build a workspace perched upon gigantic trestles, like a musical stage obstructed by walls.
His intention was to work in this space for 48 hours non-stop. The formal result was a large white cube, 4x4x4 metres in size, with guitar sounds coming out of it, maybe as a way of reminiscing the artist’s presence. This resonating music could lead visitors' attentions to a tiny elevated window. A merry jumble could be seen through it; traces of creative activity which combined musical instruments and accessories, painting materials and polished sculptural and pictorial elements. The artist smashed a hole in the side of the wall, which he used to go through into the cell. An upsidedown chair was on the edge for him to climb up. It doubled up as a delicate visual barrier that forbade complete access to this exclusive space. But this opening offered another perspective,
enabling inside elements to be noticed as if they were remnants of an evolving trail of thought.
This type of plastic experience is similar to other performances that Joris van de Moortel has created, during openings or happening concerts, with other musicians who take part in games of massacre or coating that the artist encourages during the show. For example, paint is thrown at actors wearing masks and dressed up in suits, those who take part end up totally covered. The stage then becomes the art piece. Yet this residual incongruity manages to astonish through its highly formal resonance.
During another ‘concert’, musicians create and act simultaneously, and at the end musical instruments and ‘offenders’ are covered in a slimy, coloured paste. The provocative attitude of Mike Kelly comes to mind, albeit a little less gory. The resulting works, however, are often ‘beautiful’ because they are redirected by the artist. He remodels them, raises them, and through this conceptual shift, grants them the status of works of art. So it can indeed be referred to as creating, adding various musical and sculptural elements. But it is also a radical position and although it may be provocative and iconoclastic, it remains true to art by transforming the whole into as many conceptual trophies.
In other works, the musical element isn’t broken down as much. On the contrary, the importance of music in the process is often magnified by plastic form. The artist, who is also a musician, goes beyond vinyl discs, which he can edit to create his own work. As it was, my first encounter with his work was a battery which had been musically exhibited within a kind of minimal style window box which glorified plastic and musical quotations. In a kind of artistic premise, although it is an earlier piece of work, it is very well established as much in its form as in the references it implies. Later, he created more of them, ‘trashier’ versions where the window-cube and/or the glass have been partially smashed. This could remind us of the destructive moves of Steven Parrino, who did paintings which he pounded with a sledgehammer. Symptomatically, his moves were backed by an aggressive musical performance.
Joris van de Moortel’s approach also grew from this iconoclastic obedience and from a deconstructing minimal trend. It is radical and it contains rock or even punk, and trash. However, when we look at his work, there is no feeling of a disillusioned Parrino-esque act. It may well have contained such feelings
should his work not have been marked by diverging humour which, in a poetic overturn, brought him closer to the postures of Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers.
Van de Moortel has in fact, paid a splendid tribute to Duchamp with a monumental work of art le grand verre, zelfs (2009) which epitomised the famous box in a suitcase containing the artist’s entire universe. The version of the young Belgian artist is an architectural sculpture and a tasty and grasping interpretation for specialists. The suitcase reference is straightforward and very funny but what particularly stands out is the way in which Joris van de Moortel rethinks the space. He lives in it, he builds an office in it, and he creates a workspace that allows his own formal repertoire to loiter. The very sculpture, however, rises with a big piece of glass, directly reminding of Duchamp’s iconic piece of art which withstands any definite interpretation. Here again, it seems to me that this piece evolves mischievously and Joris van de Moortel is challenging our critical analysis.
But that is not the most provocative thing the artist can do. Sometimes, he straight out encourages rejection. During a solo show in his Belgian gallery Hoet Bekaert at the Artbrussels exhibition fair of 2009, he grouped all the pieces that had previously been displayed in the gallery space by attaching
them with a huge elastic band, thus rebutting their individuality and forbidding any objective reading of his works. As a kind of agglomerate repoussoir, it was more of a protest manifesto than a consensual approach for a space as commercial as an exhibition fair. It goes without saying that we cannot really know beforehand what Joris van de Moortel has in store for us with his first solo exhibition at the gallery, but he is one of those risks that we take because they provoke feelings of joy and anticipation.

By Christine Ollier
Translated by Demelza Desforges

Les Filles du Calvaire gallery is pleased to present Hell Haiser group show.