Galerie C
Edouard Taufenbach & Bastien Pourtout
Le jardin qui bascule
Édouard Taufenbach & Bastien Pourtout, «L’herbier d’ombres» (détail), Ensemble de 16 photographies argentiques couleurs, 40 x 40 cm (chaque), 2023
Le jardin qui bascule, is the first solo show at Galerie C of the artist duo Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout, from 18 April to 3 June 2023.
Le jardin qui bascule is first and foremost an attempt to build a common space, the very space of the relationship between this artist duo. The garden is the space “between” them, built by their two eyes, worked by their two bodies, cultivated by their four hands. It is a vast playground for exchange, a place where their tastes, their curiosities, their ways of seeing the world and their chiasms, reversals and false symmetries agree and disagree. The exhibition plays with the repetition of forms. The recurrence of the square and the matrix creates passages and paths between the different types of works. Shaped, this harmony gives the visitor the possibility to model his own intimate and mental garden.
The exhibition presents 25 original works divided into 5 typologies:
1 – The Hedges
Using large silver prints of plant textures, the artists create “life-size” collages. In their creation, these works reveal pictorial and sensitive surfaces through a play of scale and architecture. As in a labyrinth, the drawing which structures the assembly of the elements (visible on the back) fades away in favour of an immersion which is conducive to daydreaming. One seeks one’s way through this vegetal maze that never stops turning on itself.
2 – The herbarium of shadows
In these “performed” photographs, the method is omnipresent. Here, each artist takes turns to photograph the other. The sheet stretched by their hands becomes a screen of projected plant shadows but also a wall that both conceals and reveals the bodies and the landscape. This game of seesawing between their two points of view creates the framework of an intimate and sensual garden. Between light and shadow, this series gives shape to a game of photographic hide-and-seek where nature in the surrounding area takes shape. Spread out on the sheets, the shadows of branches and leaves fix, out of frame, what the artists’ game prevents us from seeing head-on: a garden.
3 – The Gleaners
In the series Les Glaneurs, the hand is at the heart of the photographic dialogue. In turn, each artist takes 8 Polaroids (one film) – when one of them takes the shot, the other guides the positions of the hands. The protocol set up plays with variations of possible arrangements within the limits of a frame, here in square format. The images have neither left nor right, neither top nor bottom, they are turned around and reversed. The hand gestures draw a set of dynamic and articulated lines. They compose repertoires of forms, like signs or alphabets, which are as many choreographies and intimate geometries. The images are organised in a matrix (4×4), forming a grid of 16 images that extends this geometric game.
4 – The Legends
The Legends are montages that combine photography and drawing to create volumes, perspectives and new stories in the images. The artists use the technique of the program to “print” the line of the drawing at the same time as the negative of the photograph. The result is an image cut into two parts where the eye can move harmoniously from one side to the other. Thus, by adding the two parts of the work, we construct a new representation of these spaces. These Legends are gardens to be made, to be imagined and to be dreamed.
5 – The Swinging Gardens (NFT)
Swinging Gardens is a collection of unique NFTs, a digital extension of the physical exhibition, to be exhibited and sold on the Foundation platform. They are crypto-works made from silver photographs or digital videos. Constituted as assemblages that perpetually turn on themselves, they take up the formal vocabulary of boxwood lace or Renaissance or 17th century French garden designs. With this project, the artists aim to bring together analog and digital creation. They anchor their practice as much in the traditional use of collage as in the innovations of our time.
Exhibition from April 18 to June 03, 2023.
The gallery
Galerie C was born in 2011 in Neuchâtel (Switzerland). Galerie C defends a humanist and generous vision of art. It believes in a true dialogue with its audience and is committed to working closely with and for its artists - through off-site exhibitions, publi- cations and institutional exhibitions. Galerie C celebrates dialogue through a plurality of mediums and risk-taking, presenting authentic and singular universes established through approaches that seem essential. Manifest realities, dreamlike lucidities and visionary looks unite to move the seasons and the spirit of Galerie C. In 2020, nine years after its creation in Switzerland, Galerie C opened a second exhibition space in France. Located in Paris, in the heart of the Marais, and conceived in the continuity of its large Swiss space (approximately 400m2 of exhibition space), this smaller space is conceived as a project space. It give opportunity, for the gallery team, of new ways of presenting its artists, but also of programming exhibitions that resonate with events in the Swiss space, contemporary art fairs and institutional exhibitions of the artists.
Gallery artists
Damien Cadio • Nicolas Darrot • Mathieu Dufois • Valérie Favre • Matthieu Gafsou • Henry Glavin • Sabine Hertig • Benoit Huot • Sophie Jodoin • David Moses • Jean-Christophe Norman • Guy Oberson • Solène Rigou • Edouard Taufenbach & Bastien Pourtout
