From June 27th until September 21st 2008, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne will present the first solo show in Europe dedicated to American artist Ann Craven.

Ann Craven’s work can be situated alongside the thinking of a number of other American artists today, such as Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, or Josh Smith. They work with the potential of surface, and incorporate not only the saturation of the contemporary world with images, but also the mistakes or accidents that infinite production unavoidably generates. Her work derives from a deep and spiritual interiority; it is a means of attuning her thinking, her body, her breathing, even, to pictorial practice with almost obsessive rigor. Thus, while her work itself is formally distinctive, Ann Craven acknowledges the influence of artists such as Vija Celmins, Allan McCollum, and even Agnes Martin, whose standards for precision in artistic practice are inseparable from the physiological rhythms of their lives.

Ann Craven is, fundamentally, a painter. She paints the moon. Sometimes she paints birds, flowers, deer, or color stripes. She has painted 400 moons, not as ephemeris, but rather as though the pale light of this eternal face were calling out to missing or faraway loved ones in a kind of nocturnal reverie in which the brush were the master of ceremonies. The works are silently flush with this affective power. She then reproduces these same moons, twisting the knife into Painting’s persistent claim to always be able to underscore its own originality, to flaunt its singularity.
She paints antiquated subjects, for she knows the symbolic power of the images accompanying us, even the most insignificant ones; those empty of content that our grandmothers would keep for no veritable reason, or the gold stars that a schoolgirl or boy pins up in their room with such pride. Her birds and flowers series endlessly interpret the essential painterly relationship between background and form, and the vibration of dazzling colors as so many signs of the times. When a color is applied, Ann Craven touches her brush onto another canvas, brushing out and exhausting the color in a line. In doing so, the functions of brush and palette are transposed, to the point that the palette itself also becomes a canvas. Nothing is lost, therefore; everything is "painting", and all painting is equal in her eyes, whether copy or original, background color, abstract band, or bird on a branch.

This exhibition of Ann Craven’s work follows upon her artist residency at the Chaudronnerie at the Lycée Val de Murigny, as part of a collaborative project that the FRAC has created with this institution. A retrospective publication about her work is being prepared in association with JRP|Ringier.

Le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne présente En abrégé, une exposition d’Aurélien Froment (né en 1976 à Angers). Cet artiste développe, à partir d’une pratique protéiforme (photographie, vidéo, installation, sculpture, édition…), une œuvre homogène au sein de laquelle différents éléments structurent une réflexion sur l’image et la façon dont celle-ci se constitue à la fois dans le temps et dans l’espace. À l’instar du prestidigitateur qui apparaît dans la vidéo Théâtre de poche (2007), Aurélien Froment crée un univers très personnel dans lequel ses œuvres répondent les unes aux autres et placent le visiteur dans une sorte de jeu de l’esprit, à la manière d’un film à épisodes où « il est toujours possible de prendre une pièce comme point de départ et de la relier par différents degrés de séparation à une autre pièce ».

L’exposition En abrégé est conçue comme un espace où les technologies de l’image – et les gestes qui en découlent – sont mises en perspective, se superposent, se distinguent, s’influencent et se combinent.

Préfigurant l’illusion cinématographique et exploitant par-là même la théorie de la persistance rétinienne, le thaumatrope (du grec thauma, prodige, et tropion, tourner) est un jouet optique inventé vers 1825 qui permet à deux images imprimées recto/verso de se superposer et se mélanger. Le carton d’invitation de l’exposition illustre cette idée selon laquelle deux images peuvent en créer une troisième.

Un entretien est diffusé en fond sonore de l’exposition : on y entend le magicien Benoit Rosemont parler de l’un de ses numéros de « mémoire prodigieuse ». Il explique sa technique de mémorisation, qui repose sur l’association de chiffres à des images et de ces images à d’autres images. Grâce à une table de rappel, Benoît Rosemont forme des images mentales qui lui permettent de mémoriser instantanément tout type d’information.

En écho, Who Here Listens to BBC News On Friday Night ? (2008) emprunte son titre à une phrase mnémotechnique utilisée pour se souvenir des deux premières lignes de la table de classification des éléments établie par le chimiste russe Mendeleïev (Hydrogène, Helium, Lithium, Béryllium, Bore, Carbone, Nitrogène, Oxygène, Fluorine, Néon). Composée de 52 paires de cartes imprimées, cette installation propose au visiteur un jeu de Memory : les images disposées sur la table représentent certains des éléments présents dans l’exposition sous la forme d’images-clés. Imprimées en double, ces images peuvent être retournées deux par deux afin de reconstituer des paires. Reposant sur l’identification des motifs représentés et la mémorisation de l’emplacement des cartes retournées, cette manipulation n’obéit à aucun mode d’emploi : la grille qui figure sur le plateau de verre est une promesse d’autres possibilités quant à l’usage des images une fois toutes retournées.

Enfin, avec Balance des blancs (2007), Aurélien Froment utilise un projecteur 35mm/16mm dont le faisceau lumineux est comme « annulé » par l’éclairage de la salle d’exposition. Le dispositif de projection cinématographique devenant ainsi un modèle d’exposition, l’artiste suggère que c’est ici l’exposition qui fait film.

Chacune des œuvres présentées au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne contient un ou plusieurs éléments constitutifs des autres, comme un jeu de poupées russes un peu particulier : un jeu dans lequel le plus petit des éléments pourrait contenir l’ensemble, un ensemble d’abrégés.

From April 25th until June 8th 2008, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first solo show in a French institution of New York based artist Gedi Sibony. Sibony’s sculptures and installations feature a filigree aesthetics that is characterized by a sensual use of materials and forms. Cardboard, wood, carpets, plastic sheaths or latex paint are by multi-levelled shifting processes embedded into the exhibition room’s architectural situation. The interaction of these materials without qualities results in fragile arrangements featuring very much its particular tactile properties.

The universe proposed by Gedi Sibony takes into account hidden dimensions of space: not only measurement, proportions, style, history, but also imperfections, interstices, lights – both those which cross and those which enliven the place – resonance, life of the institution, administration, visitors, the cleaning lady, the guard’s dog, i.e. everything possible.

Sibony’s “spatial collages” oscillate between object-like appearance and installative ensembles. One can well describe them as low-key art that culminates however also in spectacular clous. As a result of the securing of evidence, the minimal dislocations and the sensorial moments, a novel constitution of space is articulated. Yet, Sibony avoids to predetermine any definite statements or to offer a simplified reading of the exposed.

Gedi Sibony’s artistic posture is very unique. He goes constantly from a very serious attitude to a great lightness, from a fundamental research to an amused nonchalance, from inspiration by the Tales of Tchouang-tseu to Buster Keaton’s sense of humor. His creative practice is basically not-discriminating, close to a principle of equality of values. He can consider another order of the world, in which the unforeseen sudden appearance would not make any more chaos, like in a wild garden.

Born in 1973 in New York where he lives and works, Gedi Sibony is the 2006 Metcalf Award winner. Amongst other, his work has been shown at Midway contemporary art center in Mineapolis in 2006, and New York’s New Museum reopening in 2007. He had a solo show at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland in the Fall of 2007.

Following Gedi Sibony’s exhibition in Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, a catalogue will be published in partnership with the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.

From May 7th until June 15th, 2008, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first exhibition in France of the Dutch artist Melvin Moti, whose practice concerns mainly the fields of cinema and video. Each of his films is the result of a slow and meticulous documentary research on which the artist confers a poetic and personal dimension.

Through a study of the mechanisms of history, Melvin Moti proposes a personal re-reading of historical facts where sound and oral character play a prevalent part. If the images generally concern the unspectacular, soundtrack is always compelling, which allows new perspective of it.

Thus, in Stories from Surinam, 2002, the artist did research on his roots through the history of 34.000 Indian labourers who, between 1873 and 1916, left India to Surinam to work on Dutch plantations. By intertwining various personal anecdotes that he recorded here and there, the structure of the film leaves a space of expression to oral transmission, to which historical and social perspectives given in books on this subject leave little chances of survival.

Each of Melvin Moti’s projects are stamped with a rigour which reveals a quality at the limits of abstraction. The artist grew up in the 1980s and 1990s – decades of superabundance, speed and multiplicity of visual signs – which refined his sensibility with images. He declares that “profusion mostly provokes a feeling of boredom” within him and that he has “always been captivated by simplicity and by the abstraction associated with simplicity.” This discharged from extra elements quality is precisely exemplified in No Show, a film made in 2004 in which a strange guided tour of The Hermitage museum is proposed. In 1941, The Hermitage’s collection was hastily taken away. As the frames were left hanging on the walls, the rest of the museum was empty. Pavel Gubchevsky guided a group of soldiers through the museum in 1943, along the empty frames. This film is based on that excursion and mixes real facts and imagination.

At the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Melvin Moti will present a new 35mm work entitled The Prisoner’s Cinema. The Prisoner’s Cinema is a phenomenon reported by prisoners confined to dark cells for long periods of time. It has also been reported by truck drivers and pilots, as a result having a neutral view, without visual information, for an extensive time. The “cinema” consists of lights, appearing out of the darkness in various colours and geometrical shapes. They are projected, as it were in front of the subject who becomes the director of his or her own cinema.

The Prisoner’s cinema combines abstract images of light shining through a church window with the account of a scientist describing her vision after being deprived from sensory information for days.Melvin Moti’s study on this physiological effect took about one year and resulted in a film dealing with these projected light forms in relation to formalism, memory and history.

From January 18th until March 30th, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents Le dernier qui parle (The last Who Speaks), an exhibition dedicated to the notions of appropriation, quotation, of borders between original feature and plagiary, of acknowledgement, of hybridity of genre and disciplines, all of this against the growing over-legislation of author’s rights.

Thanks to laws supposed to protect the artists, creation has become the simplest way of property access. And yet creators continue to live in destitution, even though modes of authors' rights allocation spread in domains sometimes very distant from artistic creation. The lawmaker struggles to realize what comes under a given artistic conscience, or from the pertinence of a text, of a picture, of an object which asserts its singularity in borrowing the forms from one another. This exhibition tries to avoid moroseness and doom watch which encircle these questions. Three independent curators – Jean-Marc Chapoulie, Pierre Leguillon and Daniel McClean – have been invited to confront their views and horizons on that topic, in creating an area of thought, reaction and creation which Le dernier qui parle is the final point. The aim is not to draw up an assessment of numerous drifts of the copyright, but to invent new areas of observation of contemporary world and thought.

For many years – like a stallholder projectionist in his Alchimicinéma screenings, or like in TDF06 in which cycling images are simply removed from the Tour de France TV reports – Jean-Marc Chapoulie has carried a transversal and bright look on the moving image. He considers exhibition, and more generally speaking art institution, as a thief market – a place of concealment where the artwork, in essence, establishes itself as a suspicious object. According to him, the notion of originality is simply no longer topical.

Artist and art critic, for many years, Pierre Leguillon has dwelt a space which he purposely whishes intermediate, and therefore has become the troublemaker regarding those who want art to be over-professionalized. Here, he moves his reflection on the basis of original pictures which inspired his famous Diaporamas he has been presenting for more than ten years, and for which look and association of ideas are considered to be fully acts. Understandably, Pierre Leguillon thinks that the best answer to authoritarian claim is to apply its logic up to confusion and salutary loss.

Both specialized lawyer in author’s rights and independent curator, Daniel McClean is the curator and editor of a project entitled Dear Images: art, copyright and culture, presented at London’s ICA in 2002. Here, his idea concerns conceptual proposals of artists linked to a yet to be written history of dating, which thus avoids the notions of object, space and time of art; as if art had to free itself from material pressures where this Last who speaks authoritarian affirmation lays.