Arthur Fouray Spectre

Spectre
Solo show
Quark
Geneva, Switzerland
13.11–21.12.2015
Opening 12.11.2015

Curator
Elisa Langlois

Photographs by Annik Wetter and Arthur Fouray

Special thanks to Elisa Langlois, Nastassia Montel, Jean-Marie Bolay, Julien Gremaud, Stéphanie Serra, Frédéric Gabioud, Grégoire Golay, Baker Wardlaw, Boesner France, BFP-CINDAR







Press Release

Arthur Fouray is a story in the making. It begins with a ‘Once upon a time’ and unfolds through recurring figures of speech that shape the content of what he says. From historical fresco to modern painting, Arthur Fouray questions history and stories by taking Pop detours such as the cinema screen or Walt Disney. Spectre is a first solo exhibition. It is a genuine opening proposal. A kind of teaser for what awaits us in the further adventures of this young artist. It lays the foundations of a cosmogony whose dynamic stakes take material form in type-objects. These come in series and weave links with one another to form a cohesive statement whose profiles are shaped through the prism of different spectres.



Finely chosen colours, perfect flat areas, well-defined painted surfaces: Arthur Fouray practises the monochrome with care and precision. If the monochrome is a historical pictorial form in the twenty-first century, with its Suprematist, spiritual and geometric figures – if the monochrome is a degree zero of painting, a simple, radical or essential gesture, with Arthur Fouray it takes on, beyond its referential dimension, an autographic and signalling dimension.





#aaafff (CAR)
2013–2017
acrylic, blackout fabric, Shark Truck
16 × 16 × 4 cm
Courtesy of the artist

The #aaafff series of paintings works according to a clearly defined formula. These monochromes, in a shade halfway between sky blue and mauve, hide an object within their stretchers, most often one taken from the domestic environment. The colour indicates the nature of the piece, a nested work that joins a monochrome canvas to an object. Here the artist reconciles abstraction and the ready-made, two pillars of the history of the avant-garde that are, on the face of it, antagonistic. Through the play of the series, the #aaafff works present themselves as the stamp of this approach. A code that signals a specific gesture, a hybrid of painting and sculpture.



#000fff (polyvision) (Spectre)
2015 
chroma-key blue, wall painting, Spectre
A/R 4 (1.33 × 3)

In the case of #000fff polyvision, Spectre proposes a variant of the rule. #000fff polyvision is a mural painting at the maximum saturation of the colour #aaafff. The work no longer hides an object but suggests its projection. The dimensions of the piece take up the ratios of the triptych polyvision screen used by Abel Gance for his film Napoléon, 1927. It is a utopian and gigantic cinematic form, a triple colour projection on three joined screens. Gance deliberately borrowed the term triptych from painting to signify the shift of medium carried out by the historical fresco towards cinema. #000fff polyvision shifts the genre once again, from the screen to painting.





Morel (#aaafff polyvision)
2015
frame, key frames, #aaafff polyvision
172 × 36 × 32 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Combining the architectural and the experimental, Morel #aaafff polyvision comes from a series parallel to the #aaafff. In Morel #aaafff polyvision, a painting is held rolled up in a case. It is a monochrome canvas 16 metres long that the artist decided to fix as it is within the sculpture: ‘a fossilisation of the object within a medium’. Beyond its role as a container, the case is in itself a complex object with its own narrative. The structure is made of 12 ready-made boxes originally intended for painting. While it recalls the wood panelling of the princely galleries of the seventeenth century, its arrangement on the wall echoes the ‘specific objects’ of Donald Judd, notably the series Untitled (Ballantine 89–49), modular wooden boxes placed horizontally on the wall.

In these two works, from the ‘Grand Siècle’ to Minimal art, from history painting to the screen, the anachronistic and conceptual gaps they perform are marked by the spectre of Marcel Broodthaers. Broodthaers is a recurring figure in Arthur Fouray’s lexicon of references, because he perfectly illustrates a search for balance and meaning in the forced unions of the pair Official Art – Critical Art.



Andy III
2015
acrylic, cotton duck, pillow
60 × 42 × 12 cm
Private collection



Kasimir (Signal Blue)
2015
acrylic, cotton duck, pillow
58 × 58 × 9 cm
Courtesy of the artist



Andy IV
2014
acrylic, cotton duck, pillow
60 × 100 × 25 cm
Courtesy of the artist



Kasimir (Blush)
2015
acrylic, cotton duck, pillow
27 × 27 × 8 cm
Courtesy of the artist



Andy (Caramel)
2014
acrylic, cotton duck, pillow
72 × 36 × 24 cm
Courtesy of the artist

Andy and Kasimir are the protagonists of the ‘canvas-objects’ series. The series began in 2013, when Arthur Fouray decided to stretch a canvas over the base of his bed. Like the #aaafff, the canvas-objects are all monochrome. Here the unifying gesture is the use of bedding as stretchers. Through the prism of the domestic and the intimate, from pillow to duvet, the canvas-objects engage the monochrome in an evident relation to the body. Their titles shed light, through their clues, on the referential content of the object, linking it to a colour or a number. In a gesture almost more Pop than Minimal, this series brings out a porosity of genres. If Kasimir pulls on the Malevich elastic, the object it presents absolves the monochrome of its Suprematist myth, that of a ‘pure’ and self-sufficient abstract painting. Just as Andy clearly refers to Warhol’s Silver Clouds, the airy lightness of the Pop helium balloons lies down beneath the canvas and the paint. By bringing a domestic structure into his canvases, Arthur Fouray turns the degree zero of painting inside out.

Elisa Langlois



L’époque et son style
2015–2017
gouache, Arches paper, cardboard
26.5 × 26 × 4 cm
Courtesy of the artist


Index