ballet mécanique
"Ballet Mécanique" at Richard Taittinger Gallery
January 16 - February 20, 2016
As its title, “Ballet Mécanique,” suggests, this show brings together an eclectic group of 20th century artists who share a concern with the diminishing divide between the natural and the artificial in an ever-growing automated society. Prompted by Fernand Léger’s experimental film, Ballet Mécanique, 1924, and inspired by Dada and post-Cubist discourses, the exhibition is divided into two groups: one exercising the potential of industrial materials to achieve a new aesthetic form, and the other challenging the oppressive logic behind industrialization.
It is worth seeing this exhibition for the opportunity to experience how they gallery's mission of bridging the gap between under recognized/unrepresented international artists and the New York art scene has not faltered since their inaugural exhibition last spring. German artist Gregor Hildebrandt’s abstract cassette tape pieces capture how collective memory can fade within the elimination of the technology recording it, while Belgian neo-conceptual artist Wim Delvoye’s stainless steel Gothic cathedral-bulldozer, D11 Scale Model 2.0 (2008), brings together standards of high art ornamentation and industrial domination. Greek-American artist Nassos Daphnis is represented with 4-A-78/4-B-78 (1978), a simple monochromatic painting with abstract forms conjuring wheels in motion. A work from later in his career, but typical of his oeuvre as a figure in the New York School of abstract painters, it reflects the then current move toward materials less refined and a flattening of the paintings surface into pure two-dimensionality.
Situated between the mechanical and the natural is man, signified by French artist Théo Mercier’s highly realistic La bête à deux dox (2011), in which two abnormally tall men face each other in a far reaching embrace beneath an elaborately draped fur coat. They seem to be acting out an unusual dance routine. Referring to nonsensical Dada theater performances, Mercier closes in on the gap between what is seen and what is unseen, a theme common to the avant-garde in an increasingly industrialized society. The Italian artist Mario Merz’s two-part Wandering Songs I (Canti errabondi I) (1983), echoes Arte Povera’s communal implementation of organic materials in a work of art and concern with mans increasing disconnection from the earth. A wooden branch pierces a block of beeswax, behind which a mural size, unframed canvas, depicts a flowering bird-like image, conjuring the transfer of energy found in nature into the man-made.
California based artist Mark Hagen’s To Be Titled (Additive Painting #72) (2010), addresses the nuances behind man-made processes by using the sun’s rays to tint canvas and create a naturally occurring geometric pattern. He overlays the abstraction made by this organic process with an additional geometric design in acrylic exterior house paint to create a soft and warm work of art. Through the use of recycled materials and iconography, New York based artist Tom Sachs communicates the oppressive nature of conformity in Hours of Devotion (2008). In this pyrographic picture lined with gold leaf, the animalistic tendency in man is suppressed by the routinized conformist nature of a devotional society. Looking backward, but moving forward, this old and new cast of artists takes Richard Taittinger Gallery to a new level of intrigue within the Lower East Side.