GALERIE MICHEL REIN

A number of themes crucial to Raphaël Zarka’s work come together in the exhibition «Les Prismatiques»: his interest for geometry, the transposition of elements from the world of painting to the world of sculpture, the construction of a body of forms developed on the model of a collection. Already present in a number of the artist’s previous works over the past few years, the shape around which this exhibition is centred – a prism whose base resembles a truncated right angled triangle.  – is taken directly from a little wooden object, a stretcher key, used by painters to adjust the tension of their canvases. Here it is used as a unit from which, through many permutations, emerge a series of sculptures and drawings.

The units which make up the three sculptures shown in the exhibition, were cut from identically sized blocks of oak, each time cut in the same way with one single slice. For each of the works 12 or 16 differently organised elements combine to create a specific configuration as with a game of building blocks. We are reminded particularly of Tangram, the ancient Chinese puzzle in which geometric pieces are juxtaposed to create figurative forms. As with one of the artist’s other series using the same type of wood, «Les Billes de Sharp» (2008), «Les Prismatiques» play with the uniformity of how the wood is cut and the random structural lines of the wood.

The collection of ink drawings which accompany the sculptures seem to have the contradictory double status of prefiguring and prolonging, standing both as preparatory drawings and a logical development of the series. They show other possible configurations of the stretcher key and
evoke many potential sculptures, suggesting that what we see in the exhibition is only a fragment of a much vaster series of permutations. Created using a type of perspective and colours which call to mind the Italian Primitives, they pick up the ancient conception of the drawing as designo : a drawing as much as a design, not only a sketch but also a detailed plan before its materialisation.

The third element of the exhibition is a series of black and white images from a collection which Raphaël Zarka has been developing over a number of years. Taken from a field of references of various contexts, the works, although predating Les Prismatiques could almost have emerged from them. The Grotticelli Necropolis, the alter installed in Weimar by Goethe for his friend Charlotte von Stein, the stellations of Max Bruckner and the portrait of Abraham Sharp are all linked by the presence in each of the images of a combination of geometric forms. Presented in counterpoint with the Prismatiques, these constructions highlight different aspects of sculpture and drawing : the question of prisms, moduli, series, permutations, the plith etc. They equally demonstrate the way in which, for Raphaël Zarka, geometric shapes represent the visible manifestations of an underground network which transcends both time and space.

Christophe Gallois

«In 1989, the American typographer Robert Slimbach designed a serif font named "Utopia" for Adobe Systems. It probably made reference to the eruption of digital technologies and the new territories which these offered to the development of typography. He might equally have wished to underline the umbilical cord which unites the utopian theme since its foundation with the practice of writing. If utopia is actually a place, a place which doesn’t exist, it is a space of potentiality, of the eventualities, like writing itself. Utopia is a territory of text where the oxymoron is natural and evidence impossible.
A landscape of letters, as Thomas More wished for, he who, on the frontispiece of the first printed edition of his Utopia, united two contradictory objects : a drawn map of the Island of Utopia and a typographical table of its geometric alphabet. It is from there that his research emerges, neither the map of the text, not the text of the map but a form of absence in the joining of the two. A transversal time, always past, present and future ; a permanent relocalisation always here and still over there : utopia is a journey through texts, unifying moments with their locations. Unless writing is the body and utopia its shadow.
Echoing the trajectory from More to Slimback and in continuing its work on text and map binding, Société Réaliste created in 2012 the font Monotopia. The protocol for construction is simple : each character of the Utopia font is written on the superposition of every other character. An upper-case letter is written with all other upper-case letters, lower case with all lowercase, a number with all numbers. Like an egalitarian cabala where no matter what the letter, all the others will also be laid down. Or like an obligation to refuse the distinction between ornament and shape.
In the exhibition at the Galerie Michel Rein, Société Réaliste experiments with their typography by presenting ornamental accumulations of Monotopia, reproducing the rythmics of political mantras, mixing the fundamental directions, researching the connections between number and dates, trying to define the shape of any date and any place, registering the common transversality of time and space, or refusing to inscribe the privative u- of Utopia.»

Société Réaliste

Société Réaliste is a parisian cooperative created in June 2004 by Ferenc Grof and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. It works with political design, experimental economy, territorial ergonomy and social engineering consulting. Polytechnic, it develops its production schemes through exhibitions, publications and conferences. In 2011 they had a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, Paris. Simultaneously to the exhibition at Galerie Michel Rein, they will present «Empire, State, Building», a comprehensive exhibition of their recent work at the Ludwig Museum, Budapest.

Michel Rein gallery is pleased to present Ici group show.

In parallel of the exhibition Là-bas at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, June 6-September 2.