In conjunction with
DU 23/09 AU 08/01/17
Aurélien Froment
Raphaël Zarka
With the support of
This exhibition stems from Raphaël Zarka and Aurélien Froment’s mutual appreciation
for each other’s work. They have both had numerous solo and collective exhibitions, in
France and abroad (Centre Pompidou, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, The Venice
Biennale...). This exhibition at les Abattoirs is one of their biggest yet, both in size and
in the number of works on show. They have woven together a captivating web, a shared
vision and harmonious journey through which the visitor can discover their work.
This combination is a new event for the museum; not only to have the opportunity of
seeing the collective project proposed by two of the most well known French artists of
their generation, but also their respective monographs.
Spread over the whole museum, the exhibition displays over a hundred works, some
of which have never been shown before. What starts as a canon for two voices quickly
becomes an exponential polyphony. Various subjects and historical figures multiply;
for Aurélien Froment and Raphaël Zarka are not the sole authors here. They invite the
visitors on a tour of an imaginary museum where the collections are not behind glass
but rather reinvented by the works which present them.
Olivier Michelon
Aurélien Froment, born in Angers in 1976, lives and works in Dublin. Though his work
is driven by the image, he creates a narrative with his unique poetic research through
which each subject is carefully focused. Here we can see his fascination with the cinema,
Ferdinand Cheval, the art of memory, and dance.
Raphaël Zarka, born in Montpelier in 1977, lives and works in Paris. As well as having
sculpture at its base, Zarka’s work is realised through painting, photography, drawing,
and film – and all through the language of geometry. His work is influenced by his love of
skateboarding combined with his interest in mathematical objects, and the History of Art.
1 - Nature and geometry
2 - Obsolescence
Influenced by the French philosopher
Rousseau, Friedrich Fröbel (1782 - 1852) the
German pioneering educational thinker, is best
known as the originator of the ‘kindergarten
system’. Based on play and visual memory,
he created ways of learning through activities.
Using simple geometric combinations, he
developed special materials such as shaped
wooden bricks and balls. The Fröbel method
seems rather like an instruction manual for
the Abstract Movement which was to come
later. Before Cézanne’s “treat nature by
means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the
cone” there were Fröbel’s “cylinders, spheres,
and cubes”. It was through these elements
that the Mondrian and Kandinsky generation
grasped their world. Although Fröbel has
become relatively forgotten, our tools for
understanding the world are still based on his
methods.
Raphaël Zarka’s ‘Forms of Rest’ look
at constructions, cultural remnants,
abandoned civil engineering structures, and
skateboarding ramps that have been taken
over by nature. Once photographed, they
are reinvested and are no longer ruins but
become sculptures, suspended in time.
Aurélien Froment has devised an exhibition
within which the educator is as much a subject
as an actor. Fröbel is « Fröbeled », conveyed
through his tools. From these, the artist
composes his photographs and recreates
objects to introduce us to the pedagogue’s
work. Froment’s photographs are both
compositions and representations. In this
huge museum-sized kindergarten, the visitor
both wanders and wonders. Going from one
photograph to the other, we are provided with
a key with which to understand the ensemble.
Integrated into this display are some of
Raphaël Zarka works, but also a painting by
Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819);
‘Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes’.
The ancient Greek Scientist (287 BC - c. 212
BC) requested - long before Fröbel - that
a sphere within a cylinder be engraved on
his tomb. Amongst his many inventions,
Archimedes discovered the endless screw, a
form which we can find in the Cenotaphs based
on a XVI Century Tudor chimney, through
which Zarka pays tribute to him. We also owe
the rhombicuboctahedron to Archimedes; a
geometric complex solid which preoccupies
Zarka’s work and which we can find two
examples of here. These two large concrete
and wooden objects (which the artist has
partly restored), where serendipitously found
by the side of the road. At first their use was
unknown, but it has since been found that they
were used as breakwaters or artificial reefs geometry designed to recreate nature.
In 1982 in ‘Fitzcarraldo’, Werner Herzog tells
the surreal story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald
whose passion for opera leads him to risk the
impossible. Rubber baron in Peru, he dreams
of building a concert hall in the jungle, and
ends up pulling a boat over a mountain.
Aurélien Froment built a scale model of
the steamer using blueprints from the film.
Similar to “scientifically approved” models
found in museums both in its realisation and
motivation, the model illustrates a pivot point
in the film and destiny of the main character.
A boat is heaved to the top of a mountain and
stays there for an instant.
There is a particular moment when
technology becomes beautiful and shows
artistic possibilities other than its former
function. At the beginning of the 20th century,
cinema met theatre and literature and has
not ceased to tell stories with a beginning
and an end ever since, where before it was
primarily a story of time and light. Froment’s
White balance is an invisible film which lasts
the duration of an exhibition and disappears
within it.
3 - Non aligned
« Somnath Mukherjee settled in Pikine, near
Dakar, in 1987. He left Calcutta along with
Ram Chandra Biswas with the intention of
doing a round the world trip by bike for peace.
Five years later, after having travelled over
twenty four countries of the African continent,
passed through cities and villages, learnt the
languages, shared meals in exchange for
improvised shows, Somnath and Ram arrived
in Senegal. Their next destination was Brazil.
Senegalese singer and fan of all things Indian,
Amadou Badiane, invited Mukherjee to teach
Indian dance. The local radio and television
stations also asked him to broadcast music,
and rapidly making a name for himself, he
decided to stay in Senegal. He founded an
Indo-Senegalese Cultural Society called
Bharat Pehchane (the Identity of India) which
still continues to bring together a small but
passionate group of people after 25 years;
transmitting the essence of India through
song, culture, and dance.”
Aurélien Froment
4 - Mobile
In ‘Fictions of the Cosmos - Science and
Literature in the Seventeenth Century’ (2011),
Frédérique Aït-Touati talks about “optical
travel” to describe the way in which the father
of modern Astronomy, Kepler, considered
his lunar observations. With the help of his
telescope he could travel to the moon and set
up camp. Near the end of the 17th Century,
Emanuele Tesauro even spoke of “glass
wings” on the subject of telescope lenses.
Many of Froment and Zarka’s works include
navigational instruments.
Raphaël Zarka’s interest for measuring
devices, scientific instruments which have
become museum exhibits, emphasises this
point. With his archival impulse, he started
cataloguing the rhombicuboctahedron
in 2010 in his ‘catalogue raisonné du
rhombicuboctaèdre’, from Archimedes’ first
26-sided form through to its many scientific
and pictorial representations and finally its
most contemporary manifestations. Through
this repertoire he makes his ‘rhombis’ as
he affectionately calls them, into beacons in
space and time.
Much of Aurélien Froment’s work is optical;
using film and photography as tools, he
changes the angle, projecting the spectator
into another space and time. Photographs
of silt-casted bells, moulded in Arcosanti
(Arizona) tell of one of Froment’s trips.
5 - Travelogues
Before, travel stories where brought back
from a voyage for want of something else.
At the end of the 16th Century in ’History of
a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called
America’, Jean de Léry laments that his
parrot had been eaten by his fellow sailors on
the way back.
Zarka’s ‘Rhombus Sectus’ and Froment’s
‘The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope’
are travelogues. The subject of the first
film is the National Library of Belarus
in Minsk, a striking building and largest
rhombicuboctahedron ever built. His film
not only shows the building, but its strange
presence, the atmosphere it creates. Like a
science-fiction film, the monument is there,
but we’re not sure why nor when it arrived.
The second film looks at another kind of
architecture, that of Paolo Soleri from the
end of the ‘60s in the Arizona desert. Here
we are told about the project of Arcosanti - a
sustainable town constructed and operating in
harmony with nature, by Roger Tomalty, one
of the first inhabitants and co-constructers.
Though the medium used it the image, the
town is explained more than shown. Shared
by the two films is a concrete bench made
a little over a year ago when Roger Tomalty
came to teach the art school students
along with Zarka and Froment how to work
according to Soleri’s methods.
6 - Conversations
At the beginning of the 17th Century a new
genre of painting appeared; like a cabinet of
curiosities, paintings full of pictures, antique
busts, objets d’art, and scientific instruments.
One of the most famous is ‘sight’ by Peter
Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel, part of
the set of five allegorical paintings of the
senses (1617-18) which are now in the Prado
museum, Madrid.
In this approach, artists reinvent existing
paintings; assembling works of art,
musical and scientific instruments, military
equipment...all cleverly composed and often
modified to fit into the composition. We see
changes in scale (from canvas to a miniature),
medium (from sculpture to painting) and even
changes in what they represent. Among the
‘real’ representations are new creations,
bringing about a new narrative...
Froment and Zarka’s work focus on preexisting ideas and forms, teasing out more
or new meanings and viewpoints, continuing
the story. This room knots together a series
of panels, volumes and transparencies,
a conversation between two places; the
Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, a large
Benedictine monastery (Tuscany), and
Arcosanti (Arizona).
From the monastery, Raphaël Zarka
« borrowed » the 16th Century decorative
panels by Signorelli and Sodoma which they
painted to break up the vast series of frescoes
of the life of St. Benedict. These geometric
compositions create a repertoire of abstract
forms, and where in the monastery they are
pushed to the bottom of the friezes, here
Zarka takes them up and presents them at
eye level.
These large drawings which evoke as much
the gouache cut-outs by Henri Matisse in
their technique as that of marquetry, are on
the same scale as the original renaissance
paintings. The boards stand out as individual
pieces but also as ornamental panels
complimenting Froment’s photographs
and models of the two main structures in
Arconsanti.
7 - Studiolo
Raphaël Zarka often uses the concept
‘documentary sculptures’ in relation to his
work. In using this term he emphasises that
he voluntarily chooses to work with preexisting forms; forms which are discovered
rather than invented. Like an archaeologist
digging up an object, the artist takes interest
not only in what it is, but where and how it
was found, and the history it has been marked
by.
From 2008, Raphaël Zarka started a
series of “Reconstructions”; architectural
maquettes sourced from 15th Century Italian
painting. The inaugural work, ‘Studiolo’ is
a reconstruction of Saint Jerome’s study
as Antonello de Messina had imagined it
in his famous painting (now in the National
Gallery, London). More than a place to study,
a studiolo was also a place where collections
of objects were kept. Before museums,
there were studiolos; these cabinets of
curiosities and wonders started to develop
during the Renaissance and gave sign to the
categorisation to come.
Aurélien Froment and Raphaël Zarka are
both fascinated with the Renaissance period
(15th -16th Century), a time when artists where
scientists and scientists artists, and which
formed a cultural bridge from the Middle
ages into Modern history. Placing the Human
at its centre, the renaissance came with a
new version of Humanism. The thirst for
knowledge strong and ideas flowing; it was
also a time when certain forms of knowledge
went on to be...unexploited...
In the installation ‘Camillo’s idea’ Aurélien
Froment draws from a text by Guilio Camillo,
an arcane philosopher who developed a
project on the memorisation of the world.
Inspired by ancient Greek idea of “the art
of memory”, his project entailed creating
images of the entire world and all the ideas
around it, and storing it all in a theatre.
Through the voice and gestures of the actress
Olwen Fouéré, Froment projects this ‘theatre
of memory’ onto the stage of the Teatro
Olimpico, the stunning theatre by Andrea
Palladio constructed at the end of the 16th
Century.
8 - Maps
In the summer of 1968, a huge earthquake
shook the Valle del Belice area in Sicily,
destroying many villages and taking over
one thousand lives. One of the villages was
Gibellina. In the 80s, the village ruins where
turned into a permanent memorial by Italian
artist Alberto Burri. Named ‘the Cretto di
Gibellina’, the site is covered in blocks of
cement, reflecting and covering what once
was there. Though it covers the past, it
conserves the memory of the village, ‘streets’
running though the site like cracks in the
earth.
Zarka often uses the term “documentary”
when talking about his work. This however,
isn’t one. It’s a transformation, a deduction,
a physical sculpture melted down into a film
which projects a block of time. In ‘Gibellina
Vecchia’, the artist doubles as a geometrician,
measuring up a frozen landscape cast in
concrete, but with indefinite borders.
Burri realised ‘Tutto nero’ in 1955 and it
entered les Abattoirs’ collection in 1993. This
artwork is part of a series using jute, a natural
medium which allowed the artist to obtain an
organic quality to his work, a shapelessness
with undefined edges.
Sylvie and Bruno, first published in 1889, was
one of the last novels by Lewis Carroll, author
of Alice‘s adventures in wonderland. The King
In the story is very good map maker, making
them ever larger scaled until drawing up a
mile-to-the-mile map. The farmers said that
if such a map was to be spread out, it would
block out the sun and crops would fail. It
stayed folded.
9 - Pocket theatre
Aurélien Froment’s ’Pocket theatre’ is
inspired by the 1930s magician Arthur Lloyd
(the so-called Human Card Index), who
asked his audience to mention any sort of
item printed on paper (playing cards, lottery
tickets...), and would then produce the
requested item from his jacket. Lloyd used
images, but also memory, allegedly holding
over 15,000 items. No one to this day has
worked out his classification system. In his
film, Froment plays with illusion and the
authority of visual communication. A man
handles a series of cards and places them
against an invisible screen between him and
us. Inspired by the interface in the film by
Spielberg, ‘Minority Report’ (2002), the action
recalls the image-swiping we do every day
on our touch screens. Though Froment made
this film in 2007, the year the iphone was
released and a few months before the ipad, its
inspiration comes from much further back.
In the 17th Century, Cassiano and Carlo
Antonio de Pozzo attempted to create a visual
record of all human knowledge in the ‘Museo
Cartaceo’ (Paper Museum). It consisted of a
collection of more than 7,000 watercolours,
drawings and prints. As the film progresses,
the magician becomes surrounded by images
as though in an aquarium of pictures where
associations and narratives come together
much like a fixed-shot film or exhibition.
10 - Instrumental sculptures
The experience of Skateboarding is key to
Raphaël Zarka’s work; not for its iconography,
but rather how being a skater results in a
different experience of the environment. He
has written much on the topography and
strategies of skateboarding and of how riding
different urban furniture and public areas
redefines those spaces. His ‘Riding Modern
Art’ series illustrates this; collected from
skate magazines, these photographs show
different public sculptures being used as
wedge and jump ramps, half pipes, and grind
rails.
Following through on his interest in re use,
the artist made « skateable » sculptures
modelled on scientific objects created by
the mathematician Arthur Schönflies (18531928), small geometric elements which fit
together without leaving any empty spaces.
Enlarged to the scale of urban furniture,
Raphaël Zarka got skateboarders to ride
these « instrumental sculptures » giving them
the task of riding, sliding, and grinding them
- leaving a final touch. These wooden shapes
are sculptures in their own right, the angles
and planes of which are perfect for skaters.
11 - Metamorphosis
Realised as a parallel to the display dedicated
to Friedrich Fröbel, Aurelien Froment’s
installation of photographs pay tribute to
Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924). “Le Facteur
(postman) Cheval” started working on his
phantasmagorical Palace in Hauterives,
Eastern France, in 1879. It took him 30 years
to complete this masterpiece - sculptures
and forms covering every surface. Here, there
appears to be a collection of portraits; those
of the strange creatures which live in Cheval’s
architecture. Using black fabric, Froment
isolated each sculpture before photographing
it thus reinforcing the theatrical nature of the
beings Cheval filled his palace with.
The clarity and geometric structure of Fröbel
seems to reply to Ferdinand Cheval’s fantastic
world. And it appears to be catching; Raphaël
Zarka’s combined interest in geometry and
the transposition of elements from the world
of painting to the world of sculpture have
resulted in the construction of a body of forms
called ‘Les Prismatiques’ ; also presented
here. Though these totem-like statues are
Anthropomorphic or zoomorphic in shape,
they were meticulously designed from
assembling many identical units in different
ways, a method which could well have been
used in Fröbel’s kindergarten. One day,
while in a friend’s painting studio, Raphaël
Zarka stumbled upon a little wooden object;
a stretcher key. This enigmatic object is used
by painters to adjust the tension of their
canvases. Here it is used as a unit from which,
through many permutations, emerge a series
of sculptures and drawings.
Aurélien Froment’s works were coproduced with: Badischer Kunstverein
(Karlsruhe), Bunkier Sztuki (Krakow),
Clark House Initiative (Bombay), FRAC
Île de-France /Le Plateau (Paris), Irish
Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), ISDAT
(Toulouse), and NCAD Gallery (Dublin)
In collaboration with: The 12th Dak’Art
Biennale (Dakar), Bharat-Pehchane
(Pikine), Le Cratère Cinema (Toulouse),
Cosanti Foundation (Scottsdale), Palais
Idéal du Facteur Cheval (Hauterives),
National College of Art and Design
(Dublin), and Red shoes (Paris)
With the support of: Arts Council of
Ireland, Galerie Marcelle Alix (Paris), and
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (Dublin)
Aurélien Froment thanks: Isabelle
Alfonsi, Sue Anaya, Cécilia Becanovic,
Rob Clyde, Anne Dallant, Marie-José
Georges, Tessa Giblin, Mary Hoadley,
Anne Kelly, Marc Lagouarre, Stephen
Marsden, Aurélien Mole, David
Mozziconacci, Somnath Mukherjee,
Pierre-Alexandre Nicaise, Chris
Ohlinger, Camila Renz, Olga Rozenblum,
Sumesh Sharma, Maki Suzuki, Roger
Tomalty, Dominic Turner and the team at
les Abattoirs.
And all the students who took part in the
Silt Casting workshop (1-8 December
2014) at ISDAT, Toulouse: Ismail AlaouiFdili, Audrey Brugnol, Antonin Detemple,
Claudine Dumas, Anaïs Hay, Rebecca
Konforti, Céline Lachaud, Jeanne
Macaigne, Liza Maignan, Isamu Marsden,
Ambre Muller, Marion Molinier, Aurélie
Perderizet, Leslie Ritz, Julie Saclier, and
David Vaucheret.
Raphaël Zarka’s works were coproduced with: Mudam (Luxembourg),
Musée Sainte Croix (Poitiers), Le Miroir
(Poitiers), BPS22 (Charleroi), Atelier
Calder (Saché), Galerie Michel Rein,
(Paris/Brussels).
Raphaël Zarka thanks: The Calder
Foundation, Alfred Pacquement,
Maxime Guitton, Corinne Bouvier,
Guillaume Blanc, Pierre-Olivier Rollin,
Pascal Faracci, Jean-Luc Dorchies,
Laurence Gateau, Enrico Lunghi,
Christophe Gallois, Clément Minighetti,
Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Michel Rein, Loïc
Chambon, Luciana Brito, deValence,
Aurélien Mole, Zohreh Zavareh, Ronan
Lecreurer, Ernesto Sartori, Cécilia
Becanovic, Raymond Azibert, Colette
Barbier, Jacques Barbier, François
Blanc, Daniel Bosser, Benoît Doche
de Laquintane, Nicolas Libert and
Emmanuel Renoird, Arnaud Oliveux,
le Frac Basse-Normandie, le Frac
Alsace, le CNAP, le Musée régional d’art
contemporain (Sérignan), the Riding
Modern Art photographers, and the team
at les Abattoirs.
Unless otherwise mentioned, all works
by Raphaël Zarka courtesy of Michel Rein
(Paris/ Brussels), and Luciana Brito (Sao
Paulo).
We would also like to thank the Musée
des Augustins, Musée de Lavaur, and
Musée du Louvre for their generous
loans during the exhibition.
Unless otherwise mentioned, all works
by Aurélien Froment courtesy of Marcelle
Alix, Paris.
les Abattoirs | 76 allées Charles de Fitte 31300 Toulouse
www.lesabattoirs.org