ART
Abraham Cruzvillegas |
Written 30 January |
Wednesday 27 October, 11:00Galerie Chantal Crousel, 75003 [map]Abraham Cruzvillegas
This project focuses on an in-between, liminal or interstitial space. It mostly involves speaking of a difference and the difficulty of describing it. It’s the result of Mexican artist
Abraham Cruzvillegas’ subjective take on Paris, where he lived for three and a half years. For him, this experience is “something definitively unfinished, something that is building itself forever: fragmentary, contradictory, weak, unstable, dark, transparent, warm, stupid, delirious, chaotic, crippled. It’s movement and life, it’s love, it’s sex, it’s me.”
In the recent years, Cruzvillegas has been working on a series of projects entitled Autoconstrucción - self-construction - and comprised of exhibitions, books, music, a film and a play. The work mainly deals with the question of identity as an indefinite, unstable construction undergoing transformation. The environment and the surrounding area of Ajusco, Mexico, where the artist was born and raised, is made up of houses, which the inhabitants built gradually over time, without a budget and with recycled materials. Helping each other out, everyone works with the materials at hand. Additions are made when needed and when materials are available.
Within the gallery, the artist creates a sculptural arrangement, whose formal references are inspired by “la petite ceinture” train tracks circling the perimeter of Paris, the “cité de la Muette” housing project in Drancy (one of the first major ones), the infamous zone, the beltway and the old fortifications of Paris. Made of scrap wood and salvaged materials, this hybrid structure is not figurative, though. It surrounds everything and everyone: structures, sculptural objects and the visitors. In order to develop and diversify his subject, Abraham Cruzvillegas met people with special skills for knitting, singing, acrobatics, gardening, music, skateboarding, dance, drawing, hairstyling to discuss these subjects… Reflecting a variety of viewpoints on contemporary Paris, these interviews, accompanied by images they inspired, are collected in a booklet. This work, which records the process of creating the project, is made available to visitors in the exhibition space. Organic elements and activity developing on and around the structure make it possible to observe – – the experience of self-construction and an interstitial space: silently, slowly but also crudely and directly.
| What: | Abraham Cruzvillegas |
| When: | Wednesday 27 October, 11:00 |
| Where: | Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot 75003 [map] |
| Transport: | Saint Sebastien Froissart |
| Cost: | 0EUR |
| Phone: | +33(0)1 42773887 |
| Email: | galerie@crousel.com |
| Web: | www.crousel.com |
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