The artists who are members of the Casa de Velázquez – Académie de France in Madrid will be in the spotlight in Paris for two exhibitions which will be held in parallel from mid-January 2020.
The first – Itinérance – is the traditional Parisian stop-over of the outgoing promotion’s year-end exhibition. Inaugurated in June 2019 in Madrid, it will be hosted at the Academy of Fine Arts (Pavillon Comtesse de Caen, 27 quai de Conti) from January 16 to February 2 and will unveil for each of the artists of the 2018-19 promotion the works more representative of the creative project he developed during a year in Madrid.
The second – AT3LI3R V3LÁZQU3Z – will take place from January 17 to 31, in the Haut-Marais, at the Atelier de Galerie Loo & Lou (20 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth). It will offer a focus on a panel of artists from the current promotion (2019-2020), exclusively presenting the first works carried out since their arrival in the Madrid workshops of the Casa de Velázquez.
On this occasion, a double portrait is offered of Clément Verger, photographer and Benjamin Mouly, videographer, from each of these promotions and presenting their projects as part of this double exhibition.
Clément Verger
In his Endeavor project, started in Portugal in 2016, Clément Verger uses the example of the introduction of the Eucalyptus tree in Europe to confront the wide phenomenon of the transport and implantation of species around the world.
Using a research-based approach, photography then serves as a tool for reading and analyzing the complex mechanisms of the Anthropocene, the era of human influence on their natural environment.
The Endeavor project takes its name from the sailboat of James Cook who, in 1768, left the English coast in the direction of Tahiti, in order to observe and document the transit of Venus in front of the sun.
This first objective achieved, the second part of the expedition – under the orders of the Royal Society – then consisted in exploring the waters of the South Pacific in search of the legendary Terra Australis Incognita. From this trip, the young Joseph Banks, naturalist and important sponsor of the mission, brought back the first specimens of eucalyptus to Europe.
Clément Verger is a French artist whose work questions the apparent naturalness of the landscapes that surround us, during the Anthropocene period, mixing artistic production and scientific protocol in a research-based approach.
After studying visual communication at ENSAAMA Olivier de Serres, Clément Verger benefited from a Leonardo da Vinci international scholarship.
In 2011, he received his Master in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster in London. Since 2013, he has regularly worked on creating workshops with the Fabrique du Regard, the BAL’s educational platform.
He was a 2017/2018 laureate of the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris, in 2018 he received the grant to support contemporary documentary photography from the CNAP and was a resident member of the Casa de Velázquez for the 2018-19 promotion.
Benjamin Mouly
Benjamin Mouly’s project at Casa de Velázquez brings together photography, documentary, B-series cinema and performance
His work thus revolves around the production of a set of filmed sequences, in direct extension of the artist’s relationship with the images. The film is here considered as a form of agglomeration and dissemination of different plastic research.
Toured between Madrid and Almería, in the desert areas that have served as a backdrop for many spaghetti westerns, the sketches stage the improbable encounter between three ingredients: birds, sugar and bodies. Voluntarily absurd, this set crystallizes in a montage of the material-image which takes as its starting point what the bringing together of the different elements visually provokes.
Leaving a large part to improvisation, the sequences above all seek to show the way in which each extra responds to the presence of the other. The connections that are formed between the subjects – but also between their symbolic charge – are then revealed in a non-linear narration, made of fragments, in a filmic object giving free rein to the association of images from different sources and nature.
Benjamin Mouly is a graduate of the National School of Photography in Arles (ENSP, 2013) and of the Geneva High School of Art and Design (HEAD, 2015).
His work has been exhibited in France (De Concert, gallery Les Filles du Calvaire, 2015) and abroad (Periscope: Beyond Photography, MC2 Gallery, Milan, 2017 / Hojas de Perro, Alliance française de Bogotá, 2015). For the past four years, he has collaborated with the Les Filles du Calvaire gallery and is a member of the Vivarium shared artistic workshop in Rennes.
His work is crossed by the question of the image, which he comes to test for himself to reflect its versatility. In his most recent productions, Benjamin Mouly is particularly interested in living and unpredictable elements: birds, sugar, butter …
Whether they come from video, photography, installation or performance, the situations it provokes examine the idea of meeting and exchange. The connection, often astonishing, of his subjects underlines the ambiguity of the relationships that settle between them, their distance, their proximity, their porosity.
The images then leave their only frame to come – in a subtle, confusing and sometimes incongruous way – to question the space that is created between them and their tangible referent. By pushing these realities against each other, he reports on a constant play of collaborations and influences which leads us inevitably to reflect on our own relation to the world.
For the ITINERANCE exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts – Pavillon Comtesse de Caen – 27 quai de Conti – 75006 Paris – as proposed we find Clément Verger, promotion 2018-2019, who follows up on his Endeavor project with a 2 ° “Circumnavigation”.
The opening of the exhibition takes place on Wednesday January 15, 2020 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. – the exhibition is in place until February 2, 2020 from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. – Free entry
For the exhibition AT3LI3R V3LÁZQU3Z at Galerie Loo & Lou – 20 rue Notre Dame de Nazareth – 75003 Paris I propose to highlight Benjamin Mouly, promotion 2019-2020, who will present a “work in progress” of his work around birds , sugar and bodies.
The opening of the exhibition takes place on Thursday January 16, 2020 from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. – the exhibition is in place until January 31, 2020 from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. – Free entry
