Antony Cairns, Julien Mauve, Lucas Leffler, Julien Mignot
After being the first art fair in the world to open its doors in September 2020 after lockdown restrictions ended, Art Paris will also be the first art fair to take up residence in the Grand Palais Éphémère on the Champ-de-Mars from 08th to 11th April 2021. This spectacular temporary structure fit for the 21st century designed by architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte is located in front of the École Militaire and aligned with the Eiffel Tower: it will play host to the Grand Palais?s events until the latter reopens in time for the Olympic Games in 2024. "New worlds", proposed by the gallery, is a collective exhibition of artists represented by Intervalle, whose dystopian work echoes our new daily life.
"New worlds" is an exhibition of artists whose dystopian work is overtaken by the zeitgeist.
Julien Mauve (1984, Fra). Through photographic staging, Julien Mauve questions our future, the threats our civilization is facing and our relationship to technologies. Greetings from Mars series refers to 1492, when Christopher Columbus discovered America. Less than 500 years later, America has become a common touristic destination for wealthy people from every part of the world. Unknown worlds are now located far from Earth and our most famous explorer are robots. « Curiosity » and « Perseverance ». As with the Wild West, we could imagine a point where Mars would become a touristic destination for people to visit and experience. NASA and SpaceX are already working on it.
This trip to Mars is linked for Julien Mauve to our announced exodus from planet Earth. In the After Lights Out series, the artist imagines a sudden power cut. The slightest light acts on us like the lighthouse on a sinking sailor. Julien Mauve won the SFR Young Talents Award (2013), he won the Sony World Photography Awards (2016), and the Talent Grant (2018).
Lucas Leffler (1993, Bel) lives and works in Brussels. The artist, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, produces in limited series unique, non-reproducible, identical images from the mud of the « Silver River. » This stream is so nicknamed after the Agfa-Gevaert photographic paper factory near Antwerp polluted its bed by dumping sludge containing silver salts into it. After the first pioneer workers who secretly extracted the silver from this sludge in the 1930s, Lucas Leffler is also digging to try to find traces of silver and produce his own photographic emulsion. The Zilverbeek project is at the same time a performance, a visual experiment and the conquest of a Grail. Ziverbeek?s works have recently entered the collection of the Antwerp Museum of Photography (FOMU), that of the Elysée Museum in Lausanne and in numerous private collections.
Julien Mignot (1981, Fra). Those new works of the Screenlove series question our relationship to voyeurism. These blocks refer to the windows through which we looked to spy on our neighbors. It was before the internet ? Today, Julien Mignot takes a close-up photograph of his computer screen connected to sexy webcams. With an analog camera, the artist deliberately produces a blurry and incomplete image. By getting close to bodies to the point of drowning the pixels, he distorts the appearance of real scenes captured. This photograph, mounted under a translucent and solid monolith, hides from our gaze. The spectator becomes voyeur, seeks the right angle. If he looks at the work from the edge, the subject disappears, disconnects and remind us the emptiness of the digital relationship. Julien Mignot is a portrait photographer for the biggest international magazines and director of the short film Under the Skin with Mathieu Amalric, Damien Bonnard and Victoire du Bois, His works have entered the collections of the National Library of France, in those of the Nicéphore Nièpce Museum , the Leica Foundation and in numerous private collections.
Antony Cairns (1980, Eng). CTY (city) series is a continuous work whereby cairns creates images from a variety of major megalopolis around the globe. His photographs are abstractions of these cities, and the nature of the abstraction is created through the artist?s own photographic processes. After making 35mm black and white transparencies using traditional darkroom techniques he then reproduces the imagery as unique art works. He is a master black and white printer more recently uses outmoded parts of computing and photographic history to reveal his art. The E.I series of works on show here are unique Electronic Ink Screens with his imagery uploaded digitally onto the screen. The screen is then encapsulated into a perspex box, creating a cubed sculpture holding a digital relic with a vision of a past city frozen on its screen. His work has been shown in well established photographic festivals and world famous art galleries, including Rencontres d'Arles (2013) and Tate Modern (2018). In 2015 he won the Hariban Award from Benrido Kyoto Collotype studio (Japan).
