Topaz Arts presents Pierre Ardouvin

TOPAZ ARTS presents
Pierre Ardouvin: Le couvert est mis (The table is set)
on view September 15 to October 27, 2018

opening reception with the artist: Saturday, Sept 15th, 3-6pm
closing hours: Saturday, Oct 27th, 1-6pm

TOPAZ ARTS, 55-03 39th Avenue, Woodside > directions
viewing by appointment: visit@topazarts.org

TOPAZ ARTS is pleased to present Pierre Ardouvin, a prominent Paris-based artist in his first solo exhibition in New York, Le couvert est mis (The table is set). Ardouvin’s works, widely exhibited throughout France and internationally, are often presented as a journey into the hazardous byways of consciousness and memory. Conjuring strange visions out of everyday reality, his installations, sculptures, and drawings are flooded with memories that are both personal and collective. Seemingly familiar scenes or objects that make up his work become distorted under the effect of an unsettling juxtaposition of senses, combining chaos, joy and nostalgia – producing a sense of déjà-vu without distinction.

This exhibition features a new installation “Le couvert est mis (The table is set)” made specifically for the Topaz Arts space during his one-month artist residency. Using ephemeral construction, a set table, raised on columns of bricks placed on top of one another, Ardouvin creates an inviting yet precarious table scene, evoking a distant memory of a horizon, which as a child, seemed so high up. Presenting a collection of works referencing the domestic and familiar sphere of the home, the artist uses objects such as curtains, a table, chairs, dishes and construction bricks (echoing the surrounding architecture of residential buildings in Queens and Brooklyn), recomposed and reused throughout the space.

Also on view are new drawings by Ardouvin, and his sculptural series “The night is not over”, (title extracted from the poem “Isolation” by Michel Houellebecq). Thick velvet curtains with large printed images of caves are attached to the walls. Placed on the floor and peeking out from underneath the curtains are a pale grey cast of a pair of feet are visible, yet the body disappears within the curtain’s folds and the cave-like images. An encounter with clandestine appearances of a world in-between, blurring the stability of the limits between the inside and the outside, past and present, the space of the portrayal and the portrayed.

Ardouvin works with the idea to construct “counter-sites” which involve questions of secrecy, exclusion, disappearances, balance and precarity. While recalling childhood games, hide and seek, and building games, these objects make up a sensorial universe, emotional and sentimental, out of line yet anchored in reality and creating spaces that may appear as what Michel Foucault called Heterotopias: “They are a type of counter-sites… These counter-sites, these localized utopias, children know them perfectly. Adult society has organized itself, and well before the children, their own counter-sites, these real spaces that stand outside all space.” (Michel Foucault, Les Hétérotopies, France-Culture, 7 December 1966).

About the Artist:
Pierre Ardouvin was born 1955 in France, and lives & works in Paris. He was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp prize in 2007. His works have been shown throughout France at Palais de Tokyo (Paris); MAM, Muséum of Modern Art d’art (Paris); MAC/VAL, Museum of Contamporary Art  d’art  of the Val de Marne; among others; and internationally at Jumex Fondation (Mexico); Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, Japan); NMCA Museum (Seoul). He is represented in France and in Los Angeles by Praz-Delavallade Gallery Paris/ Los Angeles and by Yoko Uhoda Gallery at Liège et Knock (Belgium).  www.pierreardouvin.com

This exhibition is curated and organized by Todd B. Richmond and Paz Tanjuaquio, made possible by TOPAZ ARTS, Inc., with public support, in part, from NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; and Material for the Arts, a program of DCA and the Dept. of Sanitation & Board of Education. Support for artist Pierre Ardouvin is made possible, in part, by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York.

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