LA RONDE #4 

Your contemporary art meeting
 

For the fourth consecutive year, La Ronde (“The Round”), a great contemporary art manifestation from the Normand territory, comes back. Just like in 2017 and 2018, based on a project call launched through France, the Metropolitan museums and their partners will exhibit the work of contemporary artists, renowned or emerging: sculpture, drawing, photography, installations, ceramic, performance… All forms of contemporary creation will be present and, during two months, the visitors will be able to discover, through different courses among the permanent collections, many exclusive artworks. This year, a new version of La Ronde’s revue will cover, apart from the projects presented for this exhibition, the entire actuality linked to contemporary art in the museums.

VALERIE BELIN, All Star

As part of the 2019 edition, the Fine arts museum is pleased to dedicate a room to the work of the artist Valérie Belin. Born in 1964 in Boulogne-Billancourt, she works and lives in Paris.

Considered as one of the major artists of her generation, Valérie Belin has made herself famous thanks to various series of photography. Her work focuses on the body and often raise the issue of the frontier between the living and the inanimate. The artist plays with incertitude thanks to lights, contrast, and to work on colours: In front of her images, it is often hard to say whether what we look is real or virtual, natural or artificial. 

Thus, in her series All Star, realised in 2016, the artist explore the universe of comics. She then uses them as graphic and expressive material and creates a meeting - almost a fusion with feminine characters who overlay on the background. The identity of the series raises from the contrast between the colourful, gay, dynamic and expressive world of the comics and these groomed women, elegantly dressed , embodying on the other hand a certain melancholy. The game of transparency between the background canvas and these women with their absent look or turned toward somewhere else highlights the mental or psychic dimension of these characters, more than just their physical appearance.

Coming from the background, the world of comics interferes with the thickness of the portraits and crosses them. This reconciliation reveals a contrast that is aesthetic and emotional at the same time: the dark, anxious and tormented nature of the character is highlighted.

The proliferation of drawn elements saturates the mental space of the characters. In All Star, Valérie Belin explores the toxicity of a mental chaotic world, agitated, saturated, and obsessional.

Valérie Belin Power Girl (série All Star), 2016 Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles

RINA BARNEJEE

Rina Barnejee was born in Calcutta in 1963. She works and live in NYC, eliciting craze since the early 2000 thanks to her work and course in particular.

Born in India, she was raised in England, and she then studied in the United States. Graduate in polymer engineering, she starts a promising career as a researcher in big scientific institutions, before she decided, in 1995, to focus on her creative vocation. It is, among other, this rich experience, at the crossing of various worlds, we discover in her work.

In the context of La Ronde 2019, the Fine arts museum will present four sculptures realized in 2017 and some drawings. The sculptures, built on a steel frame that the artist then dress up – she knits, attaches objects, recover with clothes – are quite sensual, and are made out of various materials: feathers, Indian fabric, flask, shell, found objects, pearls, or even silver sheet. Through this visual language of the materials, under a seducing appearance, these sculptures question the notion of identity and the contradictions of the post-colonial world – the downside of globalization. The artist gives birth to hybrid objects, poetic and exuberant. She baffles, and far from the visual marks of the spectator, introduces novelty, invites to observe closely, while her “titre-fleuve”, mysterious, written like naïve poems, contribute to arouse interrogations, evoking by bits a tormented world.

Rina Banerjee, Out of hollowness of world She punctured tight twisted curled horn, meaty teeth a wagon of emotion, 2017 - Armature en acier, soie, filets, sequins, perles, bouteilles, coquillages, plumes, verre de Murano, 180 x 110 x 45 cm Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Bruxelles

VICTOR CORD’HOMME, Nuages métalliques

Victor Cord’homme is a graduate from the National school of Fine art in Paris since June 2017. He was the laureate of the International Takifuji Art Award n°36 in 2015 in Tokyo, Japan and was nominated in 2016 for the Prix Dauphine of contemporary art in Paris. He already participated to various collective exhibitions such as La nuit des musées (“Museum’s night”) at the centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and The Big Mozaïque in Paphos, European capital of culture in Cyprus.

Between 2014 and 2017, four personal exhibitions were dedicated to him in Paris inside the Ensba and at the Crous gallery. The Round opens the Jubé room for this very young artist, who is curious about creating a dialogue between the romantic masterpieces and a sky of metallic clouds.

Victor Cord'homme vue d'exposition Aérrissage 2017

La Ronde is also:

• At the Antiquity museum, an installation by Sophie Dubosc
• At the Secq des Tournelles museum, La troisième calamité by Simon Boudvin, who gets inspiration from the graphic of Hanoi’s wire racks, projects carried by the SHED
• At the Ceramic museum, L’arc-en-ciel géant Tagadaaaa… by Charlotte Coquen
• At the Natural History museum, Arnaud Caquelard’s installation De mémoire, in the continent gallery
• At the Fabrique des Savoirs : The photographic series of Stracci de Stefano
• At the National museum of Education (exhibition centre), carte blanche to the youth illustrator Arnaud Nebbache
• At the Hangar 107, the work of Tania Mouraud