Le Parcours Saint germain est une manifestation annuelle d’art contemporain, qui propose une promenade artistique dans ce quartier mythique. Une trentaine d’artistes sont invités chaque année à créer des œuvres inédites, présentées dans les lieux emblématiques du quartier, Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, dans la chapelle de l’Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Place Furstenberg, chez Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, au Café de Flore…

Cette exposition renoue avec une longue tradition qui fit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, l’un des symboles de la vie culturelle parisienne.

www.parcourssaintgermain.com

Comité de soutien

M. Jean-Paul Claverie – Conseiller du Président – Groupe L.V.M.H
M. Jean-Pierre Lecoq – Conseiller de Paris, Maire du 6e arrondissement
M. Miroslav Siljegovic et Mme Monique Mouroux – Comité Saint-Germain-des-Prés
M. Alfred Pacquement – Directeur du Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou
M. Henry-Claude Cousseau – Directeur de l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris
Mme Pascale Le Thorel – Critique d’art et Directrice des éditions de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris
M. Alain Reinaudo – Directeur adjoint, département des échanges artistiques de CulturesFrance
Mme Marie-Laure Jousset – Responsable et conservateur du design – Centre Georges Pompidou
Mme Anne-Marie Charbonneaux – Présidente des amis du Jeu de Paume
M. Hervé Mikaeloff – Consultant en art contemporain
M. Gilles de Bure – Critique d’art
M. Kamel Mennour – Galeriste
Mme agnès b – Créatrice
M. Jean-Charles de Castelbajac – Créateur
M. Olivier Massart – La Mode en Images
Mme Sylvie Winckler – Collectionneur
Mme Astrid de T’Sercleas – Journaliste
Melle Carole Chrétiennot – Café de Flore (télécharger interview PDF)
Mme Sandra Mulliez – Collectionneur

Café de Flore and Jean-Kenta Gauthier Gallery are pleased to announce the exhibition Daisuke Yokota / Raphaël Dallaporta : Formes de l’Abstrait, a favorite of Carole Chrétiennot, artistic director of Café de Flore

The exhibition associates two sets of photographs articulated around the distance that separates abstraction from figuration in photography: the photographic objects of Raphaël Dallaporta’s Covariance series, ineluctably figurative, reveal themselves to be mathematical abstractions, while the solarized photographs of Daisuke Yokota’s Inversion series, at first glance abstract, reveal bodies, still lifes, and landscapes for the most part.

As such, a bay window of the Café de Flore becomes a sky composed of a multitude of frames and the pieces hanging from the mirrors suggest elements of nature, so dear to this mythical place.

The solarized photographs of the Inversion series by Daisuke Yokota, born in Japan in 1983, are the result of superimpositions and manipulations of photographs taken by the artist in the past. The artist, whose work proposes a dense reflection on human memory, superimposes layers of images as a metaphor for his memories and experiences. At first abstract, these images reveal themselves after contemplation, mostly bodies, still lifes, landscapes.

Raphaël Dallaporta, born in France in 1980, is developing an artistic practice based on dialogue with international researchers, and offers an unusual cohesion between history, science and art. The installation Covariance was conceived with the French mathematician Alexandre Brouste. These images, which resemble pieces of clouds in a cosmic sky, are formed by exploiting mathematical formulas incorporating a random principle of covariance.

The conjunction of contemplative works by Daisuke Yokota and Raphaël Dallaporta invites the visitor to question the border between figurative and abstract, between observation and imagination.

With the participation of Emmanuelle de l’Écotais

“Ange Leccia is a major artist, one of the French pioneers of video art. Since the beginning of the 1980s, light and image, combined with the human being, are the raw material of his work. […] Thus, faces and landscapes held by the camera respond to each other, manufactured moments, seized instants. […] The artist makes subjects appear: he films faces which, in order to become subjects, must be looked at, visited, questioned. He establishes a singular face-to-face between the filmmaker and the filmed subject in order to find out what a face reveals, beyond the surface, beyond the being. In devices mostly of great simplicity, far from superproduction in order to be as close as possible to the subject, he records breathing, the beating of eyelashes, of veins, events that make up the being: accurate portraits, captured, sometimes stolen in that they grasp the being beyond its consciousness. […] He creates effects by using slow motion, sampling, repetition, colorization and solarization. Music is another component of Ange Leccia’s works: more than a mechanism, it induces a state, a particular relationship between the image and its viewer. It is never about speeches nor words with him, it is an art if not silent, at least made of a language all the more universal that it combines image and music. […] The breath of life that infuses this installation can be read and felt as in a personal notebook. Returning to the essence of his work, to its profoundly intimate character, Ange Leccia traces here new paths between reality and fiction.” Excerpts from the text by Alexia Fabre

For this edition of Parcours Saint-Germain 2017, Ange Leccia accepts the invitation of the Café de Flore and proposes an installation developed for this mythical place. A video triptych presents a young woman, looking introspective, observing people in the café. Like a mirror installation, we can lose ourselves in our thoughts while watching this woman, thus recalling the particular state of mind of the Parisian cafés, which the Flore represents so well.

Co-production : Carole Chrétiennot / Café de Flore – Parcours Saint-Germain

The protean work of Mathieu Mercier operates a shifting from ordinary objects to aesthetic experience. Their usefulness and symbolic values merge in an art marked by the avant-gardes and ready-mades, as well as by minimal art and current design. His productions seem to reveal, in a certain immediacy, their own mechanisms of construction, but behind their purified appearance remains an aspiration to the disturbance. The numerous references infecting his universe engage a plural reflection on problems that are at once plastic, memorial and phenomenological. The artist’s hybrid sculptures and installations thus convey an ambiguous relationship to reality, losing us in our own uncertainties, bordering on the enigmatic. The viewer is invited to give free rein to their imagination in the face of the multitude of possible interpretations.

For the Parcours Saint-Germain 2016, he was invited to create an in-situ project at the Café de Flore: all of the mirrors in this iconic place were covered with a semi-transparent adhesive whose pattern was inspired by the one of stylized mirrors in pop culture, from cartoons to Roy Lichtenstein. By shaping the reflection, which allows one to see and be seen, the artist questions the specific function of this highly symbolic object while at the same time exposing the limits of the games and social codes operated in this famous meeting place. The pop reference is thus accompanied by a conceptual approach of mise en abime establishing a hesitation in the way of apprehending these places with their claimed theatricality.

Co-production : Carole Chrétiennot / Café de Flore – Parcours Saint-Germain

FRANCK SCURTI AT THE CAFÉ DE FLORE

Michel Rein Gallery

“The work of Franck Scurti [born in 1965] is difficult to classify [because] the artist places himself in a movement that is less that of the quest, of the project, than of the finding and the attention to the moment. […] Franck Scurti wanders around the world and brings back from his travels emissions of signs, often minor, hardly perceptible, without much impact. […] Franck Scurti is not an inventor: he arranges, compares, hybridizes, enlarges and distorts as needed. The material is ready, formatted, the speeches have been made, the uses determined, the ideologies well in place. What remains for the artist is the infinite possibility of playing with elements whose rigidity and fixity are only of facade; all that is left is to do is tangling origins and functions, references and attributes.” Excerpt from the text by Elisabeth Wetterwald.

For the Parcours Saint-Germain, Franck Scurti invests the Café de Flore with new pieces from the Still Life series designed specifically for this emblematic place of the Parisian cultural life.

THE GUN is a collective founded in 2004 by five British artists (Neal Fox, Robert Rubbish, Stephanie Von Reiswitz, Chris Bianchi and Bill Bragg) who publishes an eponymous magazine of narrative illustrations. The collective also creates large-scale installations and drawings that blend punk, pop and surrealist aesthetics.

On the occasion of Parcours Saint-Germain, LE GUN occupies the famous Café de Flore. On the first floor, the Bar des Cornichons has been reconstructed, which was the meeting point of a group of surrealist artists from the 1920s, obsessed with black and white, called the Calamar Noir. The animal was the projection of their imagination and latent desires while the black ink symbolized the liquid of creation. On the evening of September 25, 1925, after the five members who made up the Black Squid group had gathered around a gargantuan black and white banquet, they all mysteriously died in different circumstances that remain unknown… LE GUN leaves room for doubt as to the reality of this group, from which he had already drawn inspiration for an exhibition at the Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève in 2012.

Jeanne Susplugas, multidisciplinary artist draws our addictions and obsessions.

For the Café de Flore, the artist specifically designed placemats and a series of contextual drawings. She uses for this new series, Bottles, the principle of her drawings Containers. Here, the flasks were changed to bottles of drinks-names are replaced by words which, when assembled, form sentences.

These have two origins: some are from the collection by the artist throughout his readings for ten years, others are the result of special orders to writers. With humor and poetry, the artist pays tribute to this legendary coffee and literature that she loves

To Cerise Doucède, photography is a way to give shape to her daydreams. Passionate about staging and creating installations, her work focuses on the relationship between human beings and objects. Her characters, lost in their thoughts, project their fears, obsessions and fantasies onto the sets and objects that surround them.

For the Parcours Saint-Germain, Cerise Doucède presents a new series of commissioned works, featuring personalities from Saint-Germain-des-Prés who gravitate around the Flore and the Parcours.

“I like these moments when I can reinvent the places, appropriate the objects to make them say something else. I like to suggest and not reveal stories.”

Project by Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil made for the Café de Flore, a series of strange portraits.
(Produced by Café de Flore and Parcours Saint-Germain)

“The quest for power is a laborious work, it is never the fruit of chance. It’s also the revelation of an oversized ego. By taking official photographs of “great men” from contemporary history, the series “Les Ambitieux” proposes a radical erasure of the expression of this ego.”

Parcours Saint-Germain and Café de Flore have chosen to honor collectors and their active role in supporting artists. The artist Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil is creating a series of portraits of collectors on commission, following the same principle as his series “Les Ambitieux”. He thus pays tribute to those who are the first supporters of artists while referring to the long tradition of commissioned portraits. A game will consist in trying to recognize the collectors exposed on the mirrors of the Café de Flore.

Through her photographs, the New York artist Rhona Bitner leads an observation of the entertainment world.

She got interested in the circus and its actors: acrobats, trapeze artists, clowns and tightrope walkers emerge from the darkness while they begin their exploits. More recent series show the scene and its ornaments. Freed of their protagonists, these performance venues reveal their adornment: drapes, velvet curtains, spotlights and chandeliers occupy the image whose composition reflects a work on light.

In each of these photographs, the scene seems frozen, as in the silence that characterizes these short moments before or ending a show. Rhona Bitner captures and reflects this tension questioning the very notion of theatricality.

Seven photos of Stages series will be exhibited at the Café de Flore.

Guy Limone was born in 1958 in Villefranche-sur-Saone. He lives and works in Paris. At Café de Flore, the artist imagines around the game, placemats in the spirit of his « tapestries », created from his collections of images, taken everywhere and always. Arranged in piles, the images remind a painter’s palette, a child’s room in disorder, a card game without rules …Some photographic prints will dress the windows and mirrors of Café de Flore.

Guy Limone uses various media such as photography, painting and installation, to work on the single and multiple, uniformity and diversity. Promoting the work in series, his works are taking the shape of miniature figurines garlands inspired by various statistics, or even « tapestries », large monochrome rectangles composed of many small pictures of the same color.

Nicole Tran Ba Vang lives and works in Paris.

Nicole Tran Ba Vang performs for the Café de Flore an “in situ” project with a new series of photographs « The Land beyond the Magic Mirror » inspired by the story by Lewis Caroll. The artist continues his thinking on the relationship of the body to its surroundings, from the individual to its environment. A double trick will be created. The photographs are reflections of mirrors and also take their place. The device of presenting these photographs replacing the mirrors doubles the ambiguous interplay between the real and the fictional.

If the visitor does not find out immediately, surprising at first not to see his reflection and then find mirrors populated by creatures or clones bearing the footprints of the place on their body (the patterns are inspired from the wall or the ceiling). Embroidered on the seats and patterns, ornamental motifs escape from the image word to contaminate the physical space of the exhibition, such proliferating entities both attractive and threatening that bring us into a strange poetic atmosphere.

Natacha Lesueur at the Café de Flore with chef Alain Passart.

His usual models, wearing frozen vegetables or stuffed with slices of salami, brings from Human being a raw and strangely futuristic idea, like a mix between surgery and plastic, new kitchen and body art.

Natacha Lesueur this time adds a touch of music hall. Indeed, at the Café de Flore, her legs eaten tart photos of greed seem to emanate from the scene of a cabaret where customers would look on girls’ legs. Higher the leg!

Michael Lin was born in 1964 in Tokyo. He lives and works between Paris and Taiwan.

During the Parcours, the Café de Flore is adorned with strange windows with plant motifs and floral arabesques with bright colors that are reminiscent of the design of a perfume bottle. Very young, Michael Lin left Taiwan to New York, where he studied design. Returning to his island in 1993, he began using printed textiles from Japanese and Taiwanese tradition, which he based his work on the floral motifs.

Michael Lin’s painting has found its fulfillment in the ornamentation and its relationship to architecture. Its giant patterns use all the space available to him to decline on walls, floors and furniture, and create functional areas that invite visitors to enter.

Erwin Wurm was born in 1954 in Austria. He lives and works in Vienna.

For the Parcours Saint Germain, Erwin Wurm creates a new serie of sculptures “One minute” he realizes at the Café de Flore with personalities and regulars who frequent the area and neighborhood. This principle, that makes the reputation of the artist since 1997, is to portray characters in outlandish situations, dealing with objects of everyday life whose use has been changed.

The starting point of his work still stands in written and drawn instructions given by the artist to the « models ». Frederic Beigbeder, Christian Lacroix, Nathalie Rykiel … lent themselves in the artist’s game.

Stéphane Calais changes the decor of the Cafe de Flore, temporarily replacing existing lamps with six new ceiling lights in colored glass. This project joins a theme dear to the artist since 1994: “decorative, color and objects used as paradigms of contemporary vanities ».

Stéphane Calais was born in 1967 in Arras. He lives and works in Paris. Between « formal hand kick » and more delicate scenes made, Stéphane Calais happily combines paintings and sculpture. Where these dynamic and growing installations that evoke a related fantasy universe and mythology. Some signs are straight from the comics, others closer to a fairy tale. His works reflect a growing moment.

Literary Café, during the exhibition, around different paintings monochrome every day. The artist was present to meet the public.

Claude Rutault was born in 1941. He lives and works in Vaucresson. The artist develops his system from a premise stating that the first method is to paint with the same color as the wall on which it is hung, and it must be repainted in line whenever the wall color changes.

The artist proposes that sending a monochrome painting limited in time and involving interventions. This concept defines a work to perform, with or without the artist, and which it is impossible to imagine the result in advance. A second method complements the first: if the wall is not painted, neither is the painting… these methods were developed from this choice through numerous exhibitions, including the national museum of Modern Art in 1992.