EVA NIELSEN | Horizones – Exposition 23e Prix Fondation Pernod Ricard

Hors les murs 6 September 2022 - 29 October 2022

Address : Fondation d'entreprise Pernod Ricard, 1 cours Paul Ricard, 75008 Paris

“Horizones (Diary) – Episode 1

“I start this diary as I go to see Colette, Claire, Inés and Paul to launch the 23rd Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize. I have to write a note of intent (here it is!) and announce the programme of the companionship.

The week of October 25th, I met with Eva, Benoît, Fabiana, Hélène, Elsa and Timothée to tell them that I wanted them to participate in the prize. Their names had been coming to me for a few months, very quickly, with pleasure – a pleasure increased tenfold by the fact that I kept this list to myself, like a mental construction I had put together as I pleased, away from prying eyes, from wise or interested advice. I believe that this discretion was well kept. It was important for me to propose to them to participate in the same week, in the same movement, to explain to each of them why I wanted to expose them, why their practices pleased me, mobilised me, made me think and accompanied me since I had discovered them. I wanted to announce it to them “in real life”, as they say, to seal the beginning of a common adventure, even though my “history”, as they also say, with them is very diverse: between thirteen years and a few weeks.

Tuesday lunchtime, rue de l’Ourcq: Eva, whom I have known since her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, welcomes me to her studio to discover her latest paintings and much more. Wednesday morning, Bastille: Benoît, surrounded by the sleeping figures of Georges Jeanclos, tells me about the plants he has just exhibited at the FIAC and is about to return to their owners. Wednesday lunchtime, near the Canal Saint-Martin: after recounting her latest performance at the Cité internationale des arts, Fabiana takes my hand to accept my proposal as the sun appears on our table on the terrace. Wednesday evening, rue Daguerre: Hélène, with whom I made a telephone tour of her exhibition at the CRAC Montbéliard in May, offers me some very good wine for our first meeting. Thursday morning, Odeon: Elsa, for a reprise of previous conversations and to imagine together what might be one of the first works in the exhibition. Friday morning, inter-regional zoom: Timothée, whom I met for the first time in Basel the previous month, has given me an appointment to visit his studio in Marseille in February. And there is Jean-Michel, whom I could no longer visit in Maine-et-Loire since his death on March 18, but whose fierce freedom and constant desire for renewal prompted me to include him in this exhibition, as a possible horizon of the benefits of a controlled eclecticism.

Nothing links these six artists + 1 (really, yet). We have almost a year of work, conversations, decisions, production and doubts left to design an exhibition together. Along the way, there will be meetings, events, a film club… As for this title Horizones, provisional or definitive, a catchword and a new term, we still have to find a practical definition. I have the intuition that it is the perfect metaphor to describe the organic formation of a
I have the intuition that it is the perfect metaphor to describe the organic formation of a contemporary artistic landscape produced by the meeting of singular aesthetic universes.»

— Clément Dirié, November 26th 2021″

 

Curator : Clément Dirié

Exhibition's artists >