Julie Villard and Simon Brossard
accompanied by drawings by Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer was born in 1902 in what is now Poland. Julie Villard and Simon Brossard in 1992 and 1994 in France. The crossing between these two shores is geographical, temporal, it involves material mutations and social revolutions, and a change of habits. On these two shores, at the collective scale as at the individual scale, nothing is the same. The drift between the gastronomic imagery, post-industrial aesthetics and references to cartoons and cinema from the 80s and the epistolary exchanges concerning the life-size doll that Oskar Kokoschka wanted to have made to console him after his break-up is vertiginous. Yet from these two banks springs a greedy desire for the pleasures of the body, an eroticization of the anatomy - human or otherwise - from forms that are constantly stretched, curved, brutalized, fetishized and perverted. In an anatomical explosion, Julie Villard and Simon Brossard’s exotic animals and plants simultaneously reveal their carnivorous appetites,  their orifices, their mouths, their eyes or their udders. The bar with petroleum-colored reflections accompanies this intoxication. We are hungry as we are thirsty. All around, Bellmer's human or organic anamorphoses remind us that when we are hungry and thirsty, death is never far away. Dry but voracious, the creatures at work here seek to vampirize other species in an insatiable desire for hybridization. Red eyes, tired, continue swimming to reach the other shore.

- Elisa Rigoulet

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Avenue Montaigne is a photographic work carried out during the Paris Lockdown. It is an apology for clothing as well as a reflection on the idea of social distance. MarieVic invited her mother Geneviève to participate in a ritual: every day, they used the hour devoted to sports activities to greet each other from afar. The idea was to maintain a bond despite the distance, to make a community despite the isolation. The meeting point was the legendary Avenue Montaigne and the subject of the meeting was the occasion of a portrait. The two therefore found themselves day after day on the deserted avenue. Their perceptual capacities reduced to the image, they chose clothing as a mode of expression. Each reunion was accompanied by a new outfit, a movement of humor. Avenue Montaigne is an exercise in photographic style. History does not change, two beings present themselves to each other. Every day an image, every day a new skin. The ever-changing but constantly changing expression of a desire to be together.

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WARHOL THE FILM MAKER

In the infamous Silver Factory, Warhol’s first studio in times square, between 1963 and 1968, andy Warhol was especially active as a filmmaker, creating hundreds of experimental short films as well as feature-length movies. Warhol famously created screen tests to highlight and study various Warhol factory stars such as heiresses edie sedgewick and ‘Baby Jane’ Holzer and rock star Lou Reed of the velvet underground. Mostly working with a hand-held 16mm camera, Warhol would ask his subjects to both interact with one another or to stare blankly at the camera for long, concentrated shots.

JAMES HEDGES

James Hedges has been an active art collector and patron for over 25 years. known for his commitment to all photographic work of the artist, hedges has amassed the world’s largest private collection of Warhol photos including times square photo booth strips, polaroids, unique silver gelatin prints and stitched photos. It was only natural that Hedges’ collection expand to include the artist’s film works. Selections from the Hedges collection are often exhibited at galleries and museums around the world. David Giroire’s GALERIE!, where Jean Cocteau used to live, struck hedges as an ideal venue connecting the Cocteau heritage to that of Warhol’s most experimental practice. The style of Warhol’s boy drawings, such as Boy With Flowers, is similar to the work of Jean Cocteau who employed a reductive, linear drawing technique and whose work Warhol admired.

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As a contemporary painter, I am a part of a painting tradition that has constantly reassessed tools and supports. Painted flat, Jérôme Robbe’s works are aligned with the legacy of American Modernism, through the use of an ‘all-over’ style that beckons the viewer into the painting itself. The reflective surfaces are linked to the White Paintings (1991), Solstice and Soundings (1968) - in other words, to Rauschenberg’s early work - as well as to his later series, Borealis (1990) and Night Shade (1991), in which the reflective, white paintings and those made of Plexiglas, copper and aluminium, all encompass the image, the presence of the viewer and the surrounding space within the painting. The surfaces - bluish, silver or copper, matte and/or glossy - of Jérôme Robbe’s paintings evoke steam condensing on glass, a riverbed and an atmospheric ambiance. The reflective aspect of the paintings lure the viewer to the surface of the work, to the apparitions that appear to be ghost-like or even distorted by ripples on the support. The artist’s gesture does not indicate an intention, an apposition; it is about creating a phenomenon - transforming raw material into something unalterable. While the inspiration comes from a sky or watery surface, the multiple layers of glazing work to diminish the image, creating the sense of unsettling strangeness. Robbe’s recent paintings therefore lie between the modernist tradition of the absolute in art, free of all external references and as pure treatment of a specific material and the break with tradition ushered by Rauschenberg, who opposed any and all kinds of artistic autonomy. Jérôme Robbe seems to have fashioned a synthesis from the absolute art that can be traced to the earliest idealization of art as an image of the world.

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It all started by accident. Last March, Joseph Schiano di Lombo came across Jours effeuillés, a collection of texts by poet, painter and sculptor Jean Arp (1886-1966). The next day, he headed straight to Clamart, to the artist’s house, now a museum, where he discovered the sculptures in the garden, as bare as words, rapturous under the caresses of gloved visitors. Seeing them, Joseph felt a harpoon pierce his heart. The tip was smooth and light; the wound, delicious. The first idea that came to mind—these are the ones he usually prefers—turned out to be a bit frivolous: why not write a sonata for (h)Arp? This simple homonym generated a few graphic scores, then the idea began to grow: the Arpian channel began to take flight, the sonata turned into drawings, poems, volumes, arpeggio, forming a multidisciplinary cycle. Arp—who in his lifetime valued collective work, trading the egotism of the solitary creator for the sunny embrace of the handshake—resonates throughout like the fundamental note of a chord, becoming the focal point around which the concretions are improvised, a deliberate leitmotif through which Joseph maintains his stance as re-interpreter.

In September 2019, David Giroire decided to invite Joseph Sciano Di Lombo to his his part of town, the Jardin du Palais-Royal, to play his intriguing mysique (pronounced music).

The chance to uncover the secret of this mysterious “Y” and to experience a joyous counterpoint, between the spirituality of a tribute and the casual intimacy of a curio cabinet. This month-long exhibition also featured a scattering of small in-situ recitals, echoing the visual artworks all around. Like Schumann, who composed starting with the name of his fictitious friend, Meta Abegg, we dream, voices silent, of one of the cherished people no longer of this world, in a series for horizontal harp (we’d call it a piano), composed and performed by Joseph. We also rediscovered the harp and the musical bow, the secular strings the Pythagoreans believed to possess cathartic powers. In fact, music, as Joseph offers it to us, is exactly for this purpose: like the lyre of Orpheus, which lulls the impetuous off to slumber, his music tempers the tempestuous and creates waves in calm seas—all while embracing two cardinal deities: Light, first of all, and its counterpart, Lightness.

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Friendship is a fundamental social practice. It is defined through one’s attachment to a group as much as it could be the very origin of the groups’ existence. Its endurance is tested by the very nature of the bonds that define it. I’m getting closer to you because. I care about you because. I stay with you because. What calls it into existence is also what it brings to existence. Which is why friendship plays such an important role in practice. It is made of intentions, habits, comfort, challenge, benevolence. Forming a community in such a way to encompass all ambiguity; welcoming but narrow, gregarious yet bound.

Almost everything presented here is a story of connections, common interests, interactions. If affection is not reason enough to reflect and birth an exhibition, it nevertheless makes sense when it proves to be the luminous bystander of attractions that become exchanges, chance encounters that turn into projects. When the initial motivation - what do I get in return? - becomes compassion, identification, emulation.

Friendship is the source of unbelievable situations, unbelievable force. A classic, it does not age and is the same as it was 100 years ago. Functioning as its own strength and support system. Reiterating the value of group structures through its necessary and untamed dimension. Our basic needs respond to one another. It is the basis of all trade, before the internationalization of trade, modern means of transport, internet consumption. I will trade you this for that. But still, I need to know you. Taking care and unfolding as a fantastic means of transmission. From you to me, from me to him, to her. A social tool, friendship activates differences and allows the emergence of the new in a climate other than that of distrust. I rely on you. You place your trust in us.

– Elisa Rigoulet

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The creation of images has been a pursuit for Alon Shastel since boyhood. At the age of 10, he began using analog cameras and developing the images in a darkroom constructed in the back of an old bus. Using film, he feels he can establish a closer connection to nostalgic visions that relate to memories of his early years. In his work, Alon often documents youth in natural lands- capes, reviving his childhood memories in Israel. Throughout his photographs, youth remains an overarching theme, which he captures with rawness and sensuality. Largely cast from the street, his subjects appear in their natural state, without makeup and direct in their expressions. But Alon Shastel’s work goes beyond a superficial representation of young people reconciling their beauty and awkward- ness. He finds a deeper resonance of the individual — hidden qualities that can be at once intimate and unguarded.

Alon Shastel, born 1991 Tel Aviv, is a photographer based between Paris and Tel Aviv.

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For his solo project at Del Vaz, Paul Mpagi Sepuya presents a series of photo-proof collages made during a recent residency at Lightworks in Syracuse, New York. “The suggestive and overlapping meanings in the term “darkroom” lie at the center of my current work. It is both the historical origin of the photographer’s craft as well as the privileged yet marginalized site of queer and colored sexuality and socialization. The black velvet backdrop of the photographer’s studio not only grounds the subject in front of it, but creates an anterior space of another potential encounter. Within my photographs I inhabit the obscuring fabric, or my stand-in is a glimpse of the camera or tripod in reflection. My hands touch, manipulate and adjust. I move from in front of the camera to behind it and reflected in the mirror. My body and the black figure of the camera-tripod throw into relief the latent bodily accumulations on the mirror’s surface. I am interested in inhabiting an ambiguous place within these photographs. My role as photographer is one of negotiation - oscillating between the precision of the photographic apparatus and loss of rationality within erotic excess”.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, where he received an MFA in photography at UCLA in 2016. From 2000 – 2014 Sepuya resided in New York City, receiving a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. He is a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s grant for Los Angeles artists. Sepuya’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, among others.

Founded in 2014 by Jay Ezra Nayssan, Del Vaz is a project-space located in Nayssan’s apartment in Los Angeles, CA. The objective of the project-space is to provide artists with an alternative platform for exhibitions, performances, screenings and workshops. The name derives from the Farsi phrase dast-o-del vaz, meaning open-handed and open-hearted. This marks the second Paris exhibition for Del Vaz Projects, the first being Tulipomania with artists Michael Assiff, Pierre Banchereau / Debeaulieu, Will Benedict & Sergei Tcherepnin, Julien Ceccaldi, Sterling Crispin, Valerie Keane, Francis Picabia and Man Ray, hosted by Daniele Balice in his Paris apartment in May 2015.

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