Battat Contemporary @ ESP
April 17–May 10, 2014
Opening: Thursday, April 17, 7–10pm
Main Space:
Julie Favreau & Grier Edmundson
Project Space:
Jean-François Lauda
ESP is pleased to present the second joint exhibition exchange between Battat Contemporary and ESP.
Grier Edmdundson & Julie Favreau
Grier Edmundson's practice excavates and extrapolates the confluences, repetitions, knots, and divergences throughout the history of image-making. His persistent decontextualization of existing artworks through re-creation, mimicry, and re-presentation cast a beguiling light over the arc of historical Modernism, exhibition-making, and the medium of painting. This selection for ESP introduces a wallpaper piece based on a work of Iain and Ingrid Baxter, a mirrored box made as a gesture towards a series of facsimile brillo boxes that were de-authenticated by the Warhol Foundation and a painted reproduction of the image that represents Bas Jan Ader's final work In Search of the Miraculous. Bringing the works together Edmundson's intention is to ask the viewer to reflect upon and reconsider the ever-shifting narrative.
Julie Favreau’s practice, located at the crossroads of visual art and choreography, is based on inventing gestures out of objects (sculptures) or, conversely, on inventing sculptures out of gestures. Her projects take on different forms, such as installation, video, sculpture, performance, and photography. Recent works induce a state of heightened sensory awareness in the viewer, inviting concentration, focus, and intimacy.
Antonel is the first work of Favreau's which was produced for the theater stage as the setting for the piece where as before the choreographed encounter would have happened within the context of an immersive installation or that of a video recording. The project was first thought of as a meeting exercise between a performer and a series of sculptures which builds itself into as a self-formed ritual. This ritual takes shape through a manipulation of objects that were conceived while thinking certain beliefs, more likely animist faith.
Despite the contrast in their chosen mediums Favreau and Edmundson were brought together for this exhibition to examine the similarities in their use of the narrative and the subject of mise-en-scene within their individual practices. From work to work, we see a play between the symbolic object, the iconic image and how the combination complicates the narrative by bringing about new layers and possibilities for interpretation.
Project space : Jean-François Lauda
In the project space, Battat Contemporary is pleased to be showing new works by artist Jean-François Lauda. Through an intuitive approach, Lauda's practice grapples with the exploration and disintegration of painting. Embracing the unexpected and seeking to understand the residual traces of the image, the artist's research is characterized by gradual formal transformations as well as raw application of color. The artist’s new body of works evokes self-reflexive associations, whether through erased and fleeting gestures, juxtaposed geometric bands and fragmented or concealed elements, Lauda's compositions reveal, in the interplay of their details, a constant desire to shift the susceptible elements of chance into a kind of aesthetics of finesse.
