Ryan Gander at the Palais de Tokyo

[arzina221]

The Palais du Tokyo, which plays host to a vibrant contemporary art scene in Paris especially after having recently exposed a formidable area of square meterage within its foundations, inaugurated last Thursday (27th September) its second season entitled ‘Imaginez L’Imaginaire‘.

Emerging British Artist Ryan Gander was invited to launch the ‘Bibliothèque d’artiste’ or ‘Artist’s Library’ program – running from the 28/09/2012 to the 07/01/13 – and exhibits five distinct works where the visitor is very much encouraged to imagine the imaginary.

Prior to visiting the exhibition, I encountered Gander’s work as most people do nowadays – online, while flicking through Google images hoping to gather a sense of the objects and textures and materials this UK-based artist uses in order to explore ‘meta-versions of reality’ as one art critic in Wallpaper magazine has described.

Gander’s new work, commissioned by the Palais du mexico mobile database Tokyo to design an imaginary library, certainly seems derivative of previous pieces. The ‘artist’s mental landscape’, as suggested by the description the gallery provides, seems upon first examination a rich and familiar place – most beautifully explored in the piece AMPERSAND.

A single armchair, both functional and stylish, faces away from the gallery towards a window behind which an infinite number of objects pass by with wearying regularity. One is struck by the mechanical nature of the piece, the repetition, the watching and waiting, the expectation of objects that seem to float past from some inexhaustible source beyond the observers’ restricted point of view. Many of the objects themselves are instantly recognisable, drawn from the everyday and of varying ambiguity. One is compelled to study them before they are whisked along, replaced by another – a woollen blanket, a French mushroom knife, a roll of fabric, a pile of artificial autumn leaves. Questions arise as to why the artist has chosen to exhibit them, if they were placed randomly or carefully catalogued and displayed with utmost care and self-reflection.

[xylanth]

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