18 rue de l'Hôtel de Ville, 75004, PARIS
Opening from Wednesday to Saturday, 2pm - 7pm, for Lauren Coullard solo show.
On Saturday, Oct 12, at 7pm : » YVAIN! «, video game performance by Eric Giraudet de Boudemange
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“NIGHT FALL”
solo show by Lauren Coullard
September 14th – October 30th 2019
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Lauren Coullard‘s painting germinates and feeds itself into a systematic short circuit between abstraction and figuration, mythology and fiction. Her works exhume a “d’antan” imagery, jovially neo-medieval, chivalrous and religious, populated by dames, virgins and docile beasts — strictly courtly and mostly female. A pictorial reboot with echoes from Neo Expressionism and Transavanguardia leads to incursions into metaphysical and symbolist realms. The artist imposes confidently and proudly an anachronistic transfiguration of the present. It is more than a carnival parade, or any sort of nostalgic tribute, almost as if she were seeking to redeem the contemporary life from its schizophrenic, harsh and inconclusive narrations. Oneiric, epic, archaic and almost pagan, the characters of her works seem stuck to a world with an evanescent gravity, a theatrical set romantically adorned. They rise from the artist’s unstoppable desire to snatch light from the darkness of the canvas.
In Night Fall, her first solo show at Lily Robert, Lauren Coullard triggers a further temporal switch, moving the cursor over a science-fictional galaxy. Her lineup of ancestral figures is staged here to officiate and derail Isaac Asimov’s novella from which the exhibition derives its name. It narrates the coming of darkness on a planet perpetually illuminated by sunlight—more precisely, by six simultaneous suns. Its inhabitants are terrified by the advent of the night and its obscurity and the prophecy of an imminent total eclipse by a religious sect throws them into blind desperation. Recovering the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment and the conscious use of the rationality against every obscurantist drift of power, the story is structured around the metaphor of the relationship between light and darkness.
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Lauren Coullard graduated from the Fine Art Masters Degree at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. She recently exhibited at Galerie Georges-Philippe et Nathalie Vallois, Paris. Other notable exhibitions of her works include Art Vilnius, Belle Air in Essen, Germany, Center For Recent Drawing, ICA, and Gallery 46 in London. Salon de Montrouge, Zoo Galerie, La Tôlerie, La Générale in France. Silicon Malley in Lausanne and Peter Bergman Gallery in Stockholm. She is also a co-founder of Paris artistic space and work residency DOC and her work was featured in important French media such as Beaux-Arts Magazine, Libération or France Culture.
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Lily Robert cordially invites you to attend » YVAIN! « video game performance by Eric Giraudet de Boudemange
Saturday October 12th 2019, 7 pm
Lily Robert is pleased to participate in Paris Avant Première with YVAIN!, a video game performance by Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, staged within Lauren Coullard’s solo show Night Fall currently on view at our new location. On the occasion of this special event, the medieval-futuristic animations by the French artist and performer will inhabit the space of the gallery, intersecting with the heraldic and chivalric atmosphere of Coullard’s paintings. Here, the spectator turns into an active hero player — a valiant knight on a quest to experience and expiate the indulgent miseries of tormented love.
Inspired by a passage of The Knight of the Lion, a 12th-century novel written by Chrétien de Troyes, IVAIN! is an “artwork to be played” which explores the tribulations and cathartic potential of love, reviving its romantic and courteous vocation. The virtual epic expedition traverses archaic and digitalised civilizations, treading between ancient virtues, game codes, cyborg love, heroic gestures and sentimental redemption.
Readings and actions will be performed live by the artist alongside the active video game, transposing IRL the glorious spirit and vulnerability of the animation’s protagonist.
YVAIN! is built by game developer Tomavatar and produced by La Criée, centre d’art contemporain.
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Eric Giraudet de Boudemange was born in 1983 in Boulogne Billancourt. He lives in Paris and works in France and abroad. After studying at ensb-a, Paris, Le Fresnoy and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, he was invited to participate to several artistic residencies in Europe, as well as in Egypt, Benin and the United States. Recently, he has presented performances at the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Ricard and La Criée. He was granted solo exhibitions at the Fries Museum, Punt WG and Billytown in the Netherlands and Centre d’art Les Capucins. He is currently a resident at CAC Brétigny for a project mixing pigeon paths, meditation and labyrinths.