Loup Sarion / Langue Pendue
February 18.02.2017 - 15.04.17
SpazioA
project space
Via Amati 13, Pistoia 51100, Italy
All
images: Courtesy SpazioA, Pistoia
Photo by
Camilla Maria Santini
SpazioA is proud to present on Saturday
February 18, 2017, 6pm, at the gallery’s project space, Langue Pendue,
the first solo show in Italy by the artist Loup Sarion (1987, Toulouse,
France).
The artist presents three sculptures inspired by anthropomorphic or
everyday forms that are grouped under the title Langue Pendue. This title
refers directly to the nickname of Alex in Leos Carax’s movie The Night is
Young and echoes a corpus of Sarion’s works attached to the question of
epidermis and surface.
Seated on top of poles, the three pieces exert a strange fascination
and are all linked by an idea of quenching. One is the derivative of a cup,
the other a tap from which falls a drop of water, the third a simplified face
that exhibits a tongue (langue)...hanging (pendue). For the artist the dialogue
established between several works proves to be important, their plurality is
inherent in their understanding. “We first discover an object that we recognize
in the next one and this is how the conversation begins”. By evoking this word
conversation and returning to the title chosen for the show, the organ of the
tongue seems to be a point of analysis relevant to the work of Loup Sarion.
Part of our anatomy particularly vascularized, the tongue serves just as much
to chew, swallow, speak, taste, than to kiss. It allows feeding in a
Rabelaisian sense, helps animals like humans to lap or lick, leads to
enjoyment. The tongue is thus both very vulgar and totally refined, equating
itself with the control of the mind or language, even the knowledge of another
nation when one speaks “a foreign tongue”.
Through the fabric that is wrapping his matrices, Loup Sarion focuses
on epidermis in a work that has always established an ambiguous relationship
with painting. For some time he’s been printing and silkscreening, first on
curtains, then glass, plexiglass or plaster, the pigments aspirated by the materials, absorbed by
capillarity or evaporated in puddles embodied in the pictorial tradition.
Different mediums are thereby married, with previously drawn shapes, which
invoke Philip Guston, then carved, as a tribute to Constantin Brâncuşi, before
the canvas is dyed, so painted. Sarion assumes his appetite for complexion,
saying “all that is human is pleasing to me”, evoking what can refer to the
gesture of a reddening of flesh or a dry mouth needing to be moistened.
Loup Sarion works like a craftsman when seen in his studio. He irons
his fabrics, then superimposes them and reconstitutes them in collages, as a
reference to patchwork, covering, or packaging. He “dresses” his sculpture,
and thinks of the unmasked skin, the one that attracts or repulses, the one
that provokes the true desire.
Rocked by Leos Carax’s movie, in which Alex, a ventriloquist is
so-called Langue Pendue (glib tongue), paradoxically as he does not open it.
The 25 years-old character is in the midst of a frustrated and overflowing
energy and sensuality, with the feeling of something too narrow badly
camouflaging a bubbling fire. Like Loup Sarion, who has the elegance of
treating surfaces to allow us, in a second reading, to see what appeals to the
reality of things and beings, even when it is a little disgusting.
[Marie Maertens, January 2017]
Loup Sarion (1987, Toulouse, France) studied at Beaux arts de Paris
(2010-2015) and Cooper Union, New York (2013).
Among the shows he has taken part recently there are: Le nouveaux monde
industriel, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, Galleria Continua, Les Moulins, FR;
Humidity, Galerie Jeanrochdard, Brussels, BE; A Thousand Friends (Part 2), New
Jörg, Vienna, A; Les lèvres nues, curated by Noémie Vulpian & Jarry, DOC,
Paris, FR; I cut out the mug and went to
the bottle, with Strauss Bourque Lafrance, EXOEXO, Paris, FR. Plates of the
present, curated by Thomas Fougeirol & Jo-ey Tang-Dust, Baxter street, New
York, USA; A Last Song for the Titanic Orchestra, curated by Diesel Project
Space, 019, Ghent, BE. The artist lives and works in New York, USA.]