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CURATION : DANA MINOTTI
PHOTO : ONOKO PERCEPT 114.15:21
GALERIE POLOMARCO
A lively exhibition space located in the heart of the Old City, Galerie Polomarco offers an independent and regularly renewed selection of contemporary artworks from both established and emerging artists.
The gallery is also a meeting point for discussions and sharing, evolving with the rhythm of openings and events, where all art lovers, friends and acquaintances, as well as other enthusiasts converge.
BEYOND THE SURFACE
The exhibition presents four artists with very different practices and universes who investigate the limits of fundamental principles – light, matter, time – and their relationships.
A universe of colors and contrasted poetry takes place at 5 Grand-Rue, on the occasion of the inauguration of Galerie Polomarco.
Opening with the presence of the artists: Jacques Berthet, ONOKO – Manon Duparc & François Pain, Jan Steenman and Johann Touanen.
ONOKO
Onoko is a molecule of imagination formed by two fusional atoms, Manon Duparc & François Pain.
Trained as architects, they first took the detour by creating the photo studio “Think utopia” for which they now work for world renowned architects and museums.
Wishing to delve deeper into the abyss of their creative needs, the Onoko art studio was born. As a shared creative voice, it is a laboratory that seeks to capture the poetry of reality emanating from those “parts of a whole” that make the whole.
One of these details filled with magic and at the genesis of all atmospheres is the color. Wishing to capture this colorimetric alchemy, their photographic series “Percept” attenuates the forms to the point of abstraction, at the time of the shooting, to leave only the colors and their relationship to the light.
JACQUES BERTHET
The Geneva artist Jacques Berthet began studying painting in 1962 and turned to photography ten years later, following trips to the Middle East and Asia. He finally won the Federal Grant for Applied Arts in Photography three times (1982, 1984 and 1986) and decided to make it his profession. From the nineties onwards, the artist’s work focused on the plant and the wasteland as a territory of possibilities.
Through his work and the elements he photographs, his objective focuses on the abstract variations that landscapes can reveal, the play between colors and shapes.
Jacques Berthet, now an established artist on the Swiss and international art scene, presents us with a series of photographs of salt flats that he took in Salin-de-Giraud in the Camargue over 50 years ago. Photographs in cibachrome print, a technique that no longer exists today, these shots from the mid-seventies immerse us in the abstraction of the landscape.
JAN STEENMAN
Jan Steenman’s artistic practice is a paradoxical symbiosis between performance art and sculpture, body and object, time and space. The body becomes something distinct from the “social self” and objectifies itself as artistic material. He explores the intersection between the seductive and the strange. The object becomes alive and loses its stagnation in time.
Jan Steenman’s work combines sculpture and performance art in a homogeneous medium, using the body as a tool and sculptural material to activate the process of the work and the final result. An alienation of the human body occurs when it is transformed into a sculptural object.
This idea of living sculpture or living matter is also reflected in the aesthetics of his sculptures, which could be defined as organic. Often referring to micro-anatomy, Jan Steenman uses cellular structures as a source of inspiration to create forms, textures and vectors for his sculptures. These sculptures offer a surreal possibility to experiment with a hypothetical interpretation of our internal structures with the naked eye.
Jan Steenman is a Swiss artist born in Geneva (1994). In 2018, he received his bachelor’s degree from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (KABK). Currently living in Geneva, he has just completed a master’s degree in visual arts at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD).
JOHANN TOUANEN
“Capturing what is no longer or seems not to be”, such is the essence of this enthusiast of Lake Geneva, of the atmosphere of the harbors, of the aesthetics and the technicality of the boats. Thus, Johann Touanen’s eye is inspired by the sides and hulls of worn-out boats and sailboats and sublimates the stigma of use and time.
Gradually, lakes and sailboats, tireless models, are only pretexts for a plastic, pictorial, pointillist focus on fragments, textures, reflections that play with our senses, disturbing our perception of reality.
Details of cracked hulls, scratched by the wind, worn out by the sun; traces of ravages, shocks and bites of time; in search of universes, worlds, landscapes or paintings, abstract, or even figurative, when the diverted abstraction becomes the mirage of a reinvented reality.
galerie polomarco
Living exhibition space | Contemporary art
Beyond the surface | 10.02.23 – 15.04.23
©2023 polomarco sàrl
all rights reserved
Menu
CURATION : DANA MINOTTI
PHOTO : ONOKO PERCEPT 114.15:21
GALERIE POLOMARCO
A lively exhibition space located in the heart of the Old City, Galerie Polomarco offers an independent and regularly renewed selection of contemporary artworks from both established and emerging artists.
The gallery is also a meeting point for discussions and sharing, evolving with the rhythm of openings and events, where all art lovers, friends and acquaintances, as well as other enthusiasts converge.
BEYOND THE SURFACE
The exhibition presents four artists with very different practices and universes who investigate the limits of fundamental principles – light, matter, time – and their relationships.
A universe of colors and contrasted poetry takes place at 5 Grand-Rue, on the occasion of the inauguration of Galerie Polomarco.
Opening with the presence of the artists: Jacques Berthet, ONOKO – Manon Duparc & François Pain, Jan Steenman and Johann Touanen.
ONOKO
Onoko is a molecule of imagination formed by two fusional atoms, Manon Duparc & François Pain.
Trained as architects, they first took the detour by creating the photo studio “Think utopia” for which they now work for world renowned architects and museums.
Wishing to delve deeper into the abyss of their creative needs, the Onoko art studio was born. As a shared creative voice, it is a laboratory that seeks to capture the poetry of reality emanating from those “parts of a whole” that make the whole.
One of these details filled with magic and at the genesis of all atmospheres is the color. Wishing to capture this colorimetric alchemy, their photographic series “Percept” attenuates the forms to the point of abstraction, at the time of the shooting, to leave only the colors and their relationship to the light.
JACQUES BERTHET
The Geneva artist Jacques Berthet began studying painting in 1962 and turned to photography ten years later, following trips to the Middle East and Asia. He finally won the Federal Grant for Applied Arts in Photography three times (1982, 1984 and 1986) and decided to make it his profession. From the nineties onwards, the artist’s work focused on the plant and the wasteland as a territory of possibilities.
Through his work and the elements he photographs, his objective focuses on the abstract variations that landscapes can reveal, the play between colors and shapes.
Jacques Berthet, now an established artist on the Swiss and international art scene, presents us with a series of photographs of salt flats that he took in Salin-de-Giraud in the Camargue over 50 years ago. Photographs in cibachrome print, a technique that no longer exists today, these shots from the mid-seventies immerse us in the abstraction of the landscape.
JAN STEENMAN
Jan Steenman’s artistic practice is a paradoxical symbiosis between performance art and sculpture, body and object, time and space. The body becomes something distinct from the “social self” and objectifies itself as artistic material. He explores the intersection between the seductive and the strange. The object becomes alive and loses its stagnation in time.
Jan Steenman’s work combines sculpture and performance art in a homogeneous medium, using the body as a tool and sculptural material to activate the process of the work and the final result. An alienation of the human body occurs when it is transformed into a sculptural object.
This idea of living sculpture or living matter is also reflected in the aesthetics of his sculptures, which could be defined as organic. Often referring to micro-anatomy, Jan Steenman uses cellular structures as a source of inspiration to create forms, textures and vectors for his sculptures. These sculptures offer a surreal possibility to experiment with a hypothetical interpretation of our internal structures with the naked eye.
Jan Steenman is a Swiss artist born in Geneva (1994). In 2018, he received his bachelor’s degree from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (KABK). Currently living in Geneva, he has just completed a master’s degree in visual arts at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD).
JOHANN TOUANEN
“Capturing what is no longer or seems not to be”, such is the essence of this enthusiast of Lake Geneva, of the atmosphere of the harbors, of the aesthetics and the technicality of the boats. Thus, Johann Touanen’s eye is inspired by the sides and hulls of worn-out boats and sailboats and sublimates the stigma of use and time.
Gradually, lakes and sailboats, tireless models, are only pretexts for a plastic, pictorial, pointillist focus on fragments, textures, reflections that play with our senses, disturbing our perception of reality.
Details of cracked hulls, scratched by the wind, worn out by the sun; traces of ravages, shocks and bites of time; in search of universes, worlds, landscapes or paintings, abstract, or even figurative, when the diverted abstraction becomes the mirage of a reinvented reality.
galerie polomarco
Living exhibition space | Contemporary art
Beyond the surface | 10.02.23 – 15.04.23