Marc Johnson, Fecund Lacuna

Authors :  Éric Crubézy, Rozenn Colleter & Paul-Anthelme Adèle, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Valérie Knochel-Abecassis & Marc Johnson.
Technical details 

: 17 x 24,5 cm, 144 pages, softbound.
Languages : French – English.
Graphic design : Baldinger Vu-Huu
To be released in January 2017.
Isbn : 978-2-35864-098-5.
Public price : 28€.

Coedition La Maréchalerie – centre d’art contemporain, École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles. with the support of LVMH and private sponsors; and in partnership with Inrap.

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Art, archaeology, genetics : Is transhumanism the most dangerous idea in the world?

Marc Johnson, artist, architect and filmmaker is like the philosopher and the epistemologist, a researcher in constant search for knowledge and understanding of the world. Conceived as an art book, this publication demonstrates the working methods and the ambition of questioning what is fundamentally at stake in the world of today, and in the development and the future of humanity. More than a year of research dedicated to archeaology, during which the artist explored this discipline with the support of the Inrap. A science that, by crossing his research with the expertise of the most advanced disciplines, in particular genetics, sheds light on human history, questioning today and anticipating the future. This is precisely what the specialists, invited by Marc Johnson, highlight throughout their own experiences in this book. The anthropologists Rozenn Colleter — in collaboration with Paul-Anthelme Adèle, jurist — and Éric Crubézy, illustrate today’s impact on the analyses of relics of the past. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, philosopher, reflects on the evolution of humankind. Having analysed the posthumanist and transhumanist movements, he argues for a “metahumanity”. By presenting these texts alongside a selection of archaeological excavation photographs, sampled from the iconographic collection of the Inrap and images from the site-specific installation, Marc Johnson performs an original layout elaborated in sequences, visually acquainted with a research project. He tells a story which can only concern us, the story of humanity. Making sense as he questions us about our final outcome. [Valérie Knochel-Abecassis]

Crédit photo : Toan Vu-Huu

Note : The book is a metaphor for an archaeological dig under exploration. The blank of the page (lacuna) is the unexplored territory. The text blocks represents the archaeologists at work (the excavation). The unexplored (the blank of the page) changesas reading progresses. Finally, the excavation (reading) reveals a relic (a photograph) in place of the unexplored territory of departure. This movement in the stratigraphic depths of the earth (the volume of the book) is developing like a storyboard in which a double narrative appears (the text and the pictures). This artist’s book is a treasure hunt built with Stimmungen (moods of affective tonalities). It is composed of 5 parts (30 photographs from the digital library of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research). This assemblage resonates near three essays and an interview that punctuate this proposal with polyglossia. [Marc Johnson]

Marc Johnson is a visual artist, filmmaker and license architect. He is the author of YúYú short-film with which he won the Best Short Film award at the International Film Festival, Las Palmas de Grand Canaria, Spain in 2016. Winner of the LVMH Young Artist award competition in 2009, he presented his works at Sundance, USA in 2016 at the Moscow Biennale for young art, Russia in 2016, at Arc en rêve architecture center, France in 2016, at Berlinale Shorts in 2015 and at Jeu de Paume, art center in Paris in 2014. He studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Paris-Malaquais at the Hunter College of Art, MFA program in New York and at the academy of Arts in Hangzhou, China.

Parages, Guillaume Robert

Authors : collective.
Technical details 

: 20,4 x 24 cm, 336 pages, softback.
Language : French-English.
September 2016.
Isbn : 978-2-35864-093-0.
Public price : 32€.

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In French, a parage initially refers to the waters alongside the coast across which one makes one’s way up to the dock. With no beacons around, an unpredictable route remains to be opened. The parage is illegible. No cartographic marking has ever traced it. One should grope so as to get closer; the shore does exist. Yet, generally speaking, the parage is within reach. Parages devise a circle of vicinity, they stand all around, as close horizons. In Parages, designed to be an artist’s monograph as well as an artist’s book, I unveil my practice as a video maker and a visual artist throughout seven chapters. Seven chapters, seven different forms that keep the back and forth movement between proximity and distance alive and persistent, instilling strangeness into what is close, and making familiar what is in the distance. Each chapter takes an area as its own, lands on a context, reaches another one, and initiates a specific process of exploration. These processes take the shape of scripts in action and in movement, scripts that allow us to sail on sight, to seize the chance. So the singularity of my practice is not so much characterised by the media I use, as by my specific relationship, an almost narrative one, to the production process. As a result, some reflective, poetic and sometimes purely sensitive experiences build up territories at the junction of different fields (literature, cinema, science, geopolitics, art history…). As regards four of these chapters, I call on different artists whose artworks neighbour my parages. With their own practices, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Rémy Héritier, Marceline Delbecq and Jean-Xavier Renaud contribute to shedding light on one of the projects presented in this publication. Such invitations are helpful to understanding the part my work plays in the field of contemporary creation. They also echo my methodology, which consists in initiating collaborative spaces. A mechanic, a geophysicist, a dancer, a blacksmith, an electrician, a musician, a brother, an actress, a beekeeper, a shepherd. As many figures, encounters and savoir-faires that inspire the areas I travel through and give shape to. [Guillaume Robert, preface]

Jean Denant

Authors : Manuel Pomar (preface), Antonia Birnbaum.
Technical details 

: 17 x 24 cm, 184 pages, hardback.
Language : French-English.
September 2016.
Isbn : 978-2-35864-099-2.
Public price : 28€.

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Jean Denant addresses the world. He considers the context of his work on a geopolitical scale. It is by connecting the most trivial everyday life to the major upheavals of History that he is able to reach this universal dimension. His pieces are tautological, the shape, materials, gesture and context build an open approach where criticism is always present. Although he creates objects that have the ability to circulate, he also pays just as much attention to their spatial installation. His exhibitions always have a dimension of immersion. He orchestrates paintings and sculptures in order to completely immerse the onlooker. The scale of his works responds to this desire but also intimately conjures up the artist’s relation to his own work. Jean Denant is particularly fond of his workshop experience and this is where he builds his works to scale. He still demonstrates an economy of action and materials. Extracting matter from plaster board and wood in order to design furniture, carving supporting wood to draw forests, agglomerating debris to build pots, for each action there is a material. This formal simplicity contrasts with the complexity of the words. A work of scale, from the human to the world, the town to the individual, geological to memory, intimate to universal, Jean Denant expresses the forces of the world and their contradictions. [Manuel Pomar, excerpt from the preface]

Glenn Brown

Co-edition with Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles.
Authors : Glenn Brown, Bice Curiger, Judicaël Lavrador.
Technical details 

: 24,5 x 31 cm, 96 pages.
Language : français-anglais.
Published on 2016.
Isbn : 978-2-35864-092-3.
Public price : 26€.

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One of the most singular British artists working today, Glenn Brown draws his inspiration from art history, which he revisits and reinterprets in a unique manner. This catalogue, dedicated not only to his paintings but also to his sculptures and drawings, aims to convey the full creative scope of Glenn Brown’s oeuvre and his leading role in the renewal of contemporary painting.

After completing his MA in 1992 at London’s distinguished Goldsmiths College, Glenn Brown, born in 1966, struck out against the prevailing artistic current. At this epoch painting – and figurative painting even more so – was viewed as the poor relation among the media available to modern art. While his contemporaries were asking themselves the question “Why bother painting?”, Glenn Brown chose to make the brushmarks of earlier masters, such as Vincent van Gogh, the subject of his paintings.
The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles pays tribute to Glenn Brown with a major retrospective bringing together some thirty works. This event marks an important milestone, not only because it has been 16 years since the last retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre was held in France in 2000, but also because the exhibition unites all three media in which Glenn Brown is today active: painting, sculpture and drawing.
Since 2013 Glenn Brown has pursued drawing as an autonomous means of artistic expression, in graphic works whose surfaces are covered with an ensemble of marks and sinuous lines that interweave and reply to each other. His drawings also maintain a thematic and visceral relationship with his paintings and sculptures. These latter deploy brush strokes that have been liberated from the flat surface of his paintings and which now constitute condensed agglomerates in a medley of hues laid down on top of a base of bronze. The three new sculptures created by the artist for the exhibition Suffer Well may be read as 3D translations of the brushmarks of Frank Auerbach and of the misleading and dated colours of reproductions of works by Vincent van Gogh. One such reproduction, showing Field with Irises near Arles (of which the original painted by Van Gogh in 1888 can be seen in our other exhibition), provided the palette of Glenn Brown’s 2016 sculpture The Flowers of Arles. This profusion of tactile matter dialogues with the artist’s canvases which, although entirely smooth, likewise give the impression of an interplay of textures and feverish visual masses.
It is thus that Glenn Brown’s art reveals the subjective force of his translations of reproductions of works by earlier masters, his atomization of painting, and the inexhaustible inventiveness of his practice, which appropriates the styles and colours of drawings and classical paintings. Emanating from his works – whether drawings or paintings – is a plural, blurred and fluid reality, whose visual ambiguity evokes that peculiar to our own digital epoch.
The exhibition borrows its title Suffer Well from a song by the group Depeche Mode, as well as from one of the paintings on show, whose motif is constructed from the famous Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (1885/86) by Van Gogh. Glenn Brown’s practice is fuelled by this same interweaving of “dissonant” references, ranging from the Baroque to German realism, from new wave music to the genre of horror – and passing, of course, via the works of Van Gogh, which the artist examines with the keen eye of a goldsmith.
[Bice Curiger, curator of the exhibition]