08/11/2014 to 11/01/2015
Gleichapel presents a set of paintings from a series by Olivier Filippi. Initiated in 2012, the works are characterised by the doubling of the height of each new painting in the series. The installation of this group is linked to the particularities of the site – a public window on the street, giving way to a 9 square meter room. Gleichapel is located in the Upper Marais. It is illuminated from 14h – midnight daily.
Olivier Filippi (born in 1969, Paris) principally develops his works around several series made simultaneously in accordance with different rules. He recently exhibited at Bikini in Lyon, and has participated in a cycle of group exhibitions in Seoul and Cheong-Ju, Korea. This fall, he will have a one person exhibition at the Carmel Chapel in Chalon-on-Saône.
« Within a few years, and as slowly as possible, he produced several series of paintings. First, there were very large canvases with traversing, elegantly blended gestures within white backgrounds. Then, from 2009 forward, splendid vertical monochromes lined with narrow faded bands appeared in which a central solid surface exists in authority – a high wall or a cliff hiding the “background” of the painting. In a more recent series, he pared down the surfaces and divided them into four right-angled triangles, appearing from the left side, with faded colours dematerialising the vertical edge of the painting. With each new version of the composition, the original colours are slightly darkened with black or grey, and the size expands – from domestic home scale to museum scale. The series develops as a reflection on its own exhaustiveness : that of the painting and its duplicates, and the dilution of its status as a painting in itself.
(…) Moreover, these works also tell us that great concepts in abstract painting have in reality evaporated to the point that the surface of paintings is no longer a solid form, but rather appear as blurred or even gaseous– somewhere between flatness and illusion. (…)
It is relative, then, that Olivier Filippi also works with digital photography. Viewing his images, one could say that the origin of his art may be abstraction itself. Not only an abstraction of abstract painting, but an abstraction that can be found in reality. (…) The photographs of Olivier Filippi are not so much a source of inspiration for his paintings as a means to gather the signs of an existing language – in a world made, as Barnett Newman said, in the image of art. »
Passages from With no syllable making a sound, a text by Hugo Pernet published on the occasion of the exhibition “A set of paintings” presented the Carmel Chapel, Chalon, from 24 october – 30 november 2014.