Andreas Fogarasi. Année Le Nôtre

05.12.2013 - 11.01.2014

Cortex Athletico Galerie - Art Contemporain, Bordeaux / France

In the title choice of this new exhibition, Année Le Nôtre, shown at the Cortex Athletico – Paris gallery, he creates a falsely memorial gesture in honour of the anniversary of the birth of Louis XIV’s gardener, André Le Nôtre, as he had done previously in the 2008 exhibition – that celebrated the world of automobiles, or in 2018 – that let us foresee a close yet distant future full of promises and the most unlikely utopias. As a non-event become cultural merchandise, the anniversary date that he uses plays with the idea of the monumentalisation of the calendar.... This type of monumentalisation, produced by the cultural and State heritage industry, becomes with Fogarasi a gesture of detachment, like in the series of collages Architecture (Sights). Starting with tourist maps of the cities of Florence or Beijing – as he has done in the past for Boston, Paris or Düsseldorf – he isolates parts by cutting out spectacular and visionary architecture put forward by these cities as exemplary of their identities, icons of their cultural and inevitably progressive ideology. However, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s China Central Television Headquarters, or the train station of Florence Santa-Maria-Novella, a modernist incision in a historical city, imagined by Giovanni Michelucci, henceforth appear quite insignificant when they are shrunken by the effect of isolation and movement from the map to the white paper. Graphic signs devoid of content, shapes without amplitude, these new, postmodern movements (those of Norman Foster, Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid or Renzo Piano) go against the idea of cultural, social and topographical celebration. As icons of today brought together in the Stars artworks, they put the surface to play: that of the current relationship between space and social structure, between life and its environment.

[Quelle: www.cortexathletico.com]