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JUAN PABLO MACIAS
Word not text not law
cur. Angeles Alonso Espinosa

05.09 - 26.09.2015
opening september 5, 6-9 pm

Libertarian words and dialogue are often found at the heart of Juan Pablo Macias’ (Mexico 1974) work. For Macias, art is, above all, a dialogue: “not only with the spectator or with our time but also with a cultural heritage, with the elders, with the future, with diverse institutions and associations... a dialogue is created with a system of objects, with logics of representation for which what counts is the manner in which we invest our time and our affects.

Committed to the diffusion and preservation of anarchist literature, his multidisciplinary practise associates his searches in the archives, his own status as a reader and his role as an editor in order to deepen the relationship between the reader and the text: “a relationship which, on the principal of the reality of our society and its institutions, finds itself alienated, separated from the warmth and humidity which produced it.” He uses photography, video, installations, interventions and actions to liberate words from the institutional constraints which have confined them in the diction of law, which have reduced them to the convention of codes with a legal status subjecting them to ownership.

His approach is a bet on the emancipating power of language. A call to take back desire, to rebuild links outside of a schizoid superstructure where it is essential that art have a concrete impact on reality. The recovery, translation and distribution of Jose Oiticica’s book The anarchist doctrine accessible to all as well as the creation of BAS (Banca autonoma di sementi liberi da usura / Autonom bank of seeds free of use) with Abruzzo’s farmers in Italy are examples of this.
The metaphorical link between ideas and seeds is fundamental to this exhibition “What are seeds if not ideas? ...What are ideas if not the process of production of the cosmos, of the univocal process of production of man and nature as one, as desire? Occident’s history of progress is the denial of this bound through abstract deaths they call truths. But nonetheless, there are words of truth, humble ones that vanish in the accomplishment of their affection... truths that last the duration of their spoken moist, of their germination, of their warm vibration, that hopefully will carry on, mouth-to-mouth, soil-to-soil, as warm lifeblood”.

Like the farmer, Macias sows words and ideas, by digging into walls, with the sweat and the warmth produced by his work, he appropriates these words on his body through tattoos and brings them out of the white cube of museums and galleries through his publishing company Word + Moist Press, through his magazine Tiempo Muerto and through projects such as BAS by creating links between institutions, artistic practise and the social field.

Angeles Alonso Espinosa
July 2015

Michel Rein gallery is pleased to welcome Juan Pablo Macias’ (Mexico,1974) first solo exhibition in France.

The work of Macías explores the relation between systems of representation and affectivity, and analogically, between power knowledge and insurrectional knowledge. With his actions, interventions, work on archives and editorial projects, he intends to cause tensions between institution, art practice and social field, abandoning flat semantics by producing programs that operate directly on the biological, social and economic bodies. His work has been shown in art museums in Mexico and around the world : Villa Romana, Florence (2014) / Kunstraum, München (2013) / MUCA-ROMA, Mexico City (2012) / National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2007)... 

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FRANCK SCURTI
Spirit of Dunois Street

05.09 - 26.09.2015
opening september 5, 6-9 pm

Michel Rein gallery is pleased to welcome Franck Scurti’s fourth solo exhibition after My Creative Method (2012), No Snow No Show (2011) in Paris and Still Life (2013) in Brussels.

Since 2010, I set up my workshop in a street of Paris’ 13th district, la rue Dunois (Dunois Street), where I find my main source of inspiration. It’s right here, in this street that I find these obsolete objects or these materials stripped of value, choosing them because they show a certain potential then I redefine them, as rebus for which it is necessary to decode the socio - historical meaning.

In the first room, the collection of sculptures united under the title “Blockheads” appears at first sight to be fragments of brick walls, but on looking closer certain details seem little by little to form a face. On the wall, slightly in the background, anatomical sketches are drawn on the financial pages of newspapers. If the stockbroker’s model of the artwork’s value now substitutes the traditional merchant’s model and academic norms, these simple volumes of bricks, displaying a sarcastic smile, take on an unarguable reality when faced with the predominance of our subjective judgements.

The collection entitled “The Yellow Suite” follows the outlines that have structured my work over the past few years. In keeping with “The Brown Concept”» and “Nouvelles Lumières de Nulle Part” (“New Lights from Nowhere”) displayed at the Mamco last year in Geneva1, “The Yellow Suite” consists of a dozen works, all of which are created independently and displayed according to a linear museum layout.

The rising sun is the sign that everything is starting anew. Solar discs, perfect circles, coins are to be found throughout my work, like a leitmotiv or a brand mark. In “Salaire Solaire” (“Solar Salary”) the two moments at the rising and setting ofthe sun limit a period in time which is that of a day. Placed at the beginning and the end of the series, “Salaire Solaire” opens the tale of “Yellow Landscape”, an oil painting, which was found lacerated but has been reappraised by its framing. “Yellow Landscape” creates the fictional unity of place in this narration, whose meaning is not given. Further on lies “Judith and the Colors Catchers”, a recovered advertising poster whose colours seem to have been absorbed. The poster shows a woman’s face, adding a novelistic character to this laconic series where each work metamorphoses into a narrative sequence fed by the political, economic and scientific data that punctuate our daily lives.

As a counterpoint to this museum series, many pieces come to define recurrent themes in my work. In this way “You Cannot Loose If You Don’t Play” plays on the analogy of our paths as pedestrians and a game of chess, or “Miracle on Dunois Street” on the miraculous and unexpected find on a street corner.

Franck Scurti
July 2015 


MICHEL REIN, PARIS/BRUSSELS
42 rue de Turenne F-75003 Paris
Phone: +33 1 42 72 68 13
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Pone: +32 2 640 26 40
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