Gallery B: Hervè Ingrand “EIN, le pense-bête”

Opening Friday 13 February  2009 from 19,00 pm to 21,30 pm – From  13 February to 18 April  2009

“Well, here we are, I have moved to the phase of energy saving, according perfectly with the ideological regime that surrounds us, I don’t produce so much anymore, or the least possible. So I’m introducing you my new exhibition titled; EIN the reminder.”

To my grandfather, Emile Ingrand

Hervé Ingrand

Hervé Ingrand’s work (Paris, 1972) is the result of a continuous process which, since 1994, developed around the representation of his atelier, physical place of creation and inspiration, but at the same time, mental place transformed into a work of art. Through a painting with a narrative and installing connotation, the French artist documented objects, events and actions that have changed, through the years, his study/ laboratories. A work based on the crystallization of memory as a symbolic and periodic destruction and reconstruction.

For his third exhibition in the Raucci/Santamaria gallery, Hervé Ingrand temporarily stops the creative flow, editing his previous work, proposing new formal solutions taken from the footsteps of his past.

The Pense-Bête – the memorandum – directly recalls the work of the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers who, in 1964, plastered a pack of fifty unsold volumes of his homonymous and cryptic poem with the intention of prohibiting its reading. The invisibility of the work, degraded to an object, is the starting point that takes Ingrand to expose the review of 11 canvases, first experiments of reproduction in the atelier, multiples of a reality that was never shown and that today does not exist anymore. A temporal cyclic implant, a reminder precisely, in which painting quotes and re-transforms itself. The hic et nunc bound to those paintings is debased, putting the artist (and the spectator) in front of an ideal starting point. An ironic symbolism of echoes and colours, emphasised by the recurring of the number 1 – start of every beginning -, onomatopoeically recalled by the neologism EIN repeated serially on the canvases. A word that also reminds the sound of the exclamation “What?”, but also an integral part of the term pEINture. Moving on the ground of misunderstandings and wordplay, the artist harnesses the exhibition in a thick semantic-figurative net.

A partially untold Ingrand – notwithstanding the declarations about “energy saving” – even in the great canvas of 2002 “Complot Cabane” (290X350cm) that completes the exhibition: the typical formal composure of the artist leaves space to a more indefinite and scratched stroke. A mysterious painting, balanced between abstract and figurative, which is released from the research strictly connected to the atelier, which for years has been waiting for its exhibiting chance.