Carré, Dreyblatt, Julius, Köner, Kubisch, Roden, Vitone: découpage (f d)

The second part of the “découpage” project presents works by seven internationally renowned artists, once again featuring a mix of past e/static collaborators (Carré, Julius, Kubisch, Vitone, Roden) and artists collaborating with the gallery for the first time (Dreyblatt and Köner).
Based in Europe since the late 80s, American composer and musician Arnold Dreyblatt recently took part in an important group show, “Übersetzung. Text als Bild”, at the Hamburger Banhof in Berlin. For his Turin debut (after a concert for e/static in November 2005) Dreyblatt will be showing Retrospective (2003) a fine example of the artist's investigations into the evocative possibilities of the written word, employed here primarily as an image, as elements of a representation that occurs in space as well as in time. Dreyblatt's visual work, though rigorously devoid of sound, thus reveals itself on closer investigation to be extremely close to his work as a musician. Dreyblatt is currently preparing his first solo show for e/static, due to open this coming June.
German musician and video maker Thomas Köner is a name already familiar to Turin art-goers after 2005-2006's “The Pantagruel Syndrome” where the artist showed his splendid video installation, Suburbs of the Void, in Rivoli's Casa del Conte Verde. Now, “decoupage (f d)” features the first Italian showing of Köner's 2006 video series, Peripheriques, together with a selection of completely new night photographs that mark an important new step in his artistic career.
The show also features Rolf Julius's Ecken (corners), whose importance lies in the temporal short circuit it creates between the artist's early works and his current research. Selecting and then subsequently modifying a series of photographs he took in 1975 of the corners between wall and floor, Julius has installed them in groups of three or more on gallery walls at a distance which makes use of the wall's apparently blank space, transforming it into a spatio-temporal rhythmic pause in the work itself. A larger version of ecken was presented recently as a part of a major Julius solo exhibition, Grau schweigt, at Museum Bochum.
Christina Kubisch presents a series of ‘eyes-shut’ drawings she made in San Francisco in 2000. The drawings were always made in the evening after an intense working day, pitching the memory of just-lived experiences against her present listening to the sound of pen or marker on paper.
Luca Vitone presents two works (Polimnia, 2001, and Melpomene, 2005) which formed the opening and concluding chapters of his Turin project Corteggiamento and were also part of “Quartetto”, presented at the homonymous solo exhibition the artist gave at e/static in 2005, and again at last autumn's retrospective “At home everywhere” at the Casino de Luxembourg.
By Steve Roden the exhibition features Moon Gatherers, a work from 2002 which was part of Roden's first solo show for e/static and which appeared again in the remarkable 2005 group exhibition “Light Sculpture / Scultura leggera”, curated by Simone Menegoi in Vicenza at spazio 503 Mulino.
Patrice Carré is the author of a small piece from 2003, With and without, a kind of subtly ironic visual 'calembour', typical of the style of this as-yet little known French artist whose highly personal work deserves more attention and who is currently preparing a solo show for FRAC in Montpellier, due to open this coming spring.