70 rue des Gravilliers, 75003, PARIS
On the occasion of Paris Avant-Première, opening on Friday, Oct 11 and Saturday, Oct 12, from 11am to 7pm ; then on Sunday, Oct 13, from 11am to 6pm. Rest of the time, opening from Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-7pm.
info@galeriepact.com / galeriepact.com
+33 (0)1 77 17 23 08
DORIAN GAUDIN
« FUTURS FLIRTS »
6 SEPT. – 19 OCT., 2019
PACT WITH ROBERT JANITZ
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PACT is proud to present “futurs flirts”, Dorian Gaudin’s second solo show at the gallery.
Conceived as a theatrical scene, “futurs flirts” is an exhibition whose works engage together in a performative representation.
First we look at two kinetic sculptures, whose movement – catching the eye – is predictable, repetitive, almost obsessive. The human brain anticipates what will happen next, knowing that the plant, like the bouquet, will eventually fall before it gets up and starts again. This prediction could remove all interest from the scene, yet the spectator cannot help but wait for the fateful moment of the fall. Sadistic pleasure? Enjoy being right? Or on the contrary, the subsistence of a doubt: the machine is not a human being and its movement is not evident. We observe it to try to understand it, as we try to understand nature by contemplating its most beautiful and violent aspects. The mechanical actions of Gaudin’s sculptures bypass this line between self-mutilation and the pleasure of pleasure, activating the circuit of reward in our brain, which cannot help but assign a human framework to the non-human world around us. The mechanical actions skirt this line between self-harming and self-pleasuring, activating the pleasure and reward pathway of our brains that also can’t help but ascribe a human framework over the nonhuman world around us.
Overlooking the kinetic works, a vaulted resin sky, lifted by a rope and pulley, dominates the stage, like the setting of a bare modernist play.
As a master in the art of staging, Gaudin extends the landscape to chrome-plated aluminium sculptures as a testament to a past violence against the metal – the very metal that creates the machines. The chromed aluminum sculptures hint at the artist’s physicality in wrestling the sheets of metal into crumpled fields of action. This physicality indeed punctuates the artist’s work, halfway between the experimental physics laboratory and the theatre, drama and comedy, play and wrestling.
Throughout the exhibition, humour acts as a vector of human empathy, dragging the viewer into a cul-de-sac realization: our projections of anthropomorphic sympathy are indeed just projections, falling on the fundamental otherness of these objects’ mechanical nature. They suggest, in the words of Gaudin, “a warning against our colonial instincts, our need to spread, our need to fabricate a world in our image.”
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Dorian Gaudin (born in 1986, Paris, France) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA. His meticulously engineered mechanical sculptures have been exhibited in major galleries and museums around the world, including recent solo and group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2017), Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China (2018) and the Greater Biennal de Taipei at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2018). He recently had personal exhibitions at Ghebaly gallery in Los Angeles, USA (2019), Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, USA (2019) and Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin, Germany (2018). His works are part of important public and private collections, including the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. His practice has been covered in the pages of Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Mouvement Magazine and Elephant.
Dorian Gaudin will be exhibited again at PACT (January 2020) in a duo show with the German artist Robert Janitz (born in 1962 in Alsfeld, Germany; represented by the Meyer Rigger, Anton Kern, König and CANADA galleries).
About “Future Flirts”, Robert Janitz, Dorian Gaudin’s close friend, wrote:
The sun is waking up on the island.
Only ideas and insects notice it.
On the beach inhabited by ideas and insects, there is also an Automaton that thinks mechanically.
Click click click click.
These are temporary vacuum cleaner ideas.
Why this scene is happening, we don’t know.
During the night, neither the insects nor the Automaton get agitated.