Tetsuya Ishida @ Gagosian Paris

Tetsuya Ishida, Recalled, 1998

Tetsuya Ishida paintings are filled with alienated young men, merging with machines, becoming them, dissected and packed in boxes, bodies trapped by buildings. The figures are tragic and yet, curiously identifiable. As the exhibition press release says, Ishida's style has a socialist realist tone and form, but at the same time, the figures fall into the surrealist nightmares of René Magritte. Most obviously the narratives reminded of Kafka's office workers consumed not always by institutions, but here, by machines, technology, and consumerism. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Convenience Store Mother and Child, 1996

One of the most disturbing aspects of Ishida's figures is that they are often sleeping, or catatonic, only ever active when limbs have become machine parts. Even then, the young men are comatose, at the will of the machine, everyday appliances, or architectural structures. Ishida's is a world in which human is no longer awake and machine has taken over. And worse, there is no attempt to challenge their colonisation. The young men and their machines also often occupy raked spaces, at times giving the impression that the figures are on their way to falling out of the painting. Otherwise, the spaces contribute to the surrealist tenor, suggesting that they are inside a staged performance, having lost all connection to authentic behaviour. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Gripe, 1997

While the paintings discourse on the alienation and mechanisation of daily life in urban 1990s Japan, anxiety and isolation brought about by economic decline and the so-called lost generation, their prescience of Western countries today is uncanny. Apparently, the paintings show predominantly Ishida's self image struggling with mental illness, alienation, and anxiety. However, the depressive mood and mechanical metamorphosis is easily identifiable to anyone working in a repetitive and repressive structural situations. The paintings show a world in which obedience and conformity are not negotiable, where the ability to negotiate has long been lost.

 

Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998

Adding to these Kafkaesque nightmares is the common presence of animals in the paintings. Once again the young male figures are enveloped by animals, usually of the insect type: cockroaches, lizards, walruses, animals with claws and tusks made to trap a body. The disquieting proximity of these terrifying scenarios to our own existence aside, this exhibition is a great introduction to an artist who for me, and I imagine many others in Europe, was previously unknown.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part @ Gagosian Paris

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

Blue is the colour of life and death in Sterling Ruby's sumptuous works seen through the window of Gagosian's rue de Castiglione space. Multi-media collages in lazulite blue, furious scrawls, water stained paper, and the reminder of flowers blown in the wind fill the walls behind human-sized bronze sculptures  of dead flowers painted blue. The flowers are mostly sunflowers charred with their heads bowed, what semblance of leaves disfigured by the elements. All of the flowers are in couples, bound together at their bases. Alternatively, they look at each other, their "faces" turned inwards, admiring each other.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

The flowers are somewhere between life and death. As the exhibition title suggests and the blurb confirms, they are saying their wedding vows, till death us do part. Beyond the obvious references to the mayhem and turbulence of life, the richness (and expressiveness) of art through the use of blue, if we anthropomorphise the flowers, and the traces of life in the paper collages, these sculptures are overflowing with emotion. In them, we see agony, the love of flowers that are bound together, the fragility and transience of life, sadness at the anticipation of passing. We also witness an energy swirling around the sculptures, as they weather their surroundings with dignity.

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9181), 2026

In Ghosts (9181), winds with the intensity of hurricanes batter the page and the vulnerable flowers in the corner. It is as though they have disintegrated before the storm is over. In Ghosts (9182), the threat has been and gone across fields of blue scrawls, having ripped through and left its traces in the form of diluted colour. Here, the flowers have escaped the path of the extreme event, but they are not without mourning and loss of their petals. 

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9182), 2926

While the marriage of the mixed media collages and bronze sculptures is unique and the different media are intimately entwined, I couldn't help finding the dead sunflowers expressing the undulations of human life to be, if not derivative of Anselm Kiefer's, at least, something that Kiefer has already done. That said, the small group of works is - as always for Gagosian's installations - beautifully exhibited. The works are powerful, and being inside the space gives the feeling of being inside a much larger world, a feeling made possible by the range of emotions and the intensity of their differences. 

Calder. Rêver en équilibre @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Alexander Calder, Black Widow, 1948

The Alexander Calder exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton to mark the centenary of his arrival in France is glorious. The curation of the exhibition looks as effortless as the works themselves, and yet, to showcase their weightless, ethereality must have been as carefully determined as the engineering of the metal sculptures. The simplicity and fluency of these incredibly sophisticated mechanisms, evoking the dreamy and the equilibrium of the exhibition's title was breathtaking. 

Alexander Calder, The Brass Family, 1929

Calder's early works are playful and fantastic, while at the same time being deeply connected to everyday life in modernity. His focus on city life—the circus, the velodrome, and other activities of industrial modernity—shows his engagement with his historical moment and the new kinds of movement /motion /kineticism introduced to daily life thanks to the manufacture of metal and other forms of industrial production. In his early years, he was also working for a sports illustrated magazine, and the National Police Gazette where he was hired to produce drawings of the circus. However, even though he was in many ways required to engage with modern life, his turn to sculpture and performance in the circuses were entirely his invention. In them, other than the wonder of the constructions, we see his interest in movement, flying and ethereality. From early on, he also shows a fascination for the physicality of the body, even though the body is rendered as a void through twisted wire. 

Alexander Calder, Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong, 1948

Similarly, his use of wire for technical and creative innovation to explore scale and the formal possibilities of his circus and other sculptures is fascinating. Calder used these everyday materials in exciting ways, pushing them against themselves to create delicate forms that were everything the material was not. In these sculptures, metal and other industrial materials become delicate, made into perfectly balanced creatures that fly and somersault, dance and play musical instruments. From the very earliest work, we see that Calder's use of wire is like line in a drawing often very simple. But while the objects look effortless, their conception and making cannot have been easy. 

Alexander Calder Jewelry 

I am not usually a fan of exhibitions that include the work of other artists, however here, works by Picasso, Leger, Miro and Duchamp are effective. They show that Calder was not an outlier,  that his work was closely related to that of his contemporaries, particularly in their common pursuit to take art out of its two dimensional frame, to reflect modern life, and to escape its bourgeoise pretensions. In addition, the juxtaposition with well known contemporaries shows that Calder's art was serious - despite its playfulness - engaging with the concerns of the time. Abstraction, movement, form, bodies, circus, sports, mechanical movement were all the subjects of representation to show modernity in their midst. Calder's sculptures may look different from the work of others, but there are many similarities. There is also something akin to Man Ray's light machines - and his photographs of light - in search of abstraction without weight and material. 

Alexander Calder, Aztec Josephine Baker, 1976

As his sculpture develops, many of the works become as much about the shadow as the sculpture itself. We see this in portraits such as that of Josephine Baker. Moving around the wire sculptures, when we look at them from different angles, we see the representations making different faces and the bodies move. And like the later abstract sculptures, these works are also about shapes, form, moving in space, constant kinesis. One of Calder's great inventions was to take sculpture out of its verticality, typified by a dependence on pedestals. He hangs sculpture from ceilings, attaches it to walls. And then he shifts beyond painting and sculpture to make works about time, and works that exist through movement of wind and the energy in the air. In some of his most sophisticated sculptures such as, metal creates the sound of the air in a way that we would not otherwise be able to hear. 

Installation @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Calder's works are also about unpredictability, a lack of control, and the creativity that comes with that lack of control. Because the works come alive when we are with them, in are presence, they transform, become different. These works are still and reflective, silent and dreamy, light, but they manage to be complex and contradictory. Monumental and invisible, making the atmosphere visible and audible. Always turning. Steel becomes completely whispy, itself an challenge their material. And yet, they occupy public space, even as they are ephemeral. Calder's feat is to create complex engineering structures, made to look like fabric blowing in the wind.