Kamel Mennour opens its third solo exhibition of the work of Liam Everett
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Friday, November 22, 2024


Kamel Mennour opens its third solo exhibition of the work of Liam Everett
Installation view « The Winds », kamel mennour (6 rue du Pont de Lodi), Paris, 2019. © Liam Everett. Photo. archives kamel mennour. Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris/London.



PARIS.- Kamel Mennour announced the gallery’s third solo exhibition of the work of Liam Everett. The American painter’s new works have made an unexpected recovery. After the Camp Fire that destroyed thousands of acres of forest and caused at least 85 deaths in California in autumn 2018, Everett, based in the north of San Francisco and deeply touched by the terror of the catastrophe and its consequences, destroyed the works that he had previously begun for the exhibition in Paris.

‘These fires caused a great distress because what was happening was uncontrollable. For almost two weeks it was necessary to stay inside because of the toxic levels of smoke. All this destabilized me and the result was a desire for raw clarity. During the fires, I destroyed several of the paintings and started over with new material, new sizes, new directions. I felt an urgency to get close to the truth of this situation and to enter into my own fear also.’1

As if the paintings had allowed access to both flames and fear. As if they had made it possible to confront the fascination of a radical energy and the spectacle of destruction in which the archaic and contemporary worlds come together in the primordial and the sacred.

Well before the fires, which would become the most destructive in the history of the United States, Everett had felt a desire to ‘create a kind of painting that could be only visible through wind, through a primary force’. The weaving of desire and destruction, of life and death, is terrifying. For it is truly the wind—more precisely the hot and dry autumn winds, blowing at 100 km/h, devouring the equivalent of a football field every three seconds—that breathed its gigantic power into the fires.

In order not to annihilate everything, tragedy needed to be rearranged by comedy. The saving surge came from laughter and the absurd. It is why Everett also decided to reinterpret Gustave Courbet’s Un enterrement à Ornans (1850) and repurposed the narrative of the somber funeral for a theatrical representation in which the guests are actors playing at mourning [Untitled (Comedy at Ornans), 2018]. These actors are free of illusion like Beckett’s tramps living in a devastated world where everyday language wavers towards poetic and comical eruptions.

By repurposing Courbet’s painting and making a painted floor that covers the main level of the gallery, Everett brings us into contact with ‘another stage’ (this is the way Freud defined the unconscious [ein Andere Schauplatz]). It includes three domains: that of the visitor, that of the painting, and that of the exhibition space. Entering the gallery and walking on the floor, the visitor finds herself immediately placed on an intimate footing with painting and phenomena—fire, wind, gravity.

In his time, Courbet brought both spectator and painter within the painting2. He revolutionized painting by dissolving the distance between canvas and viewer. Everett, for his part, offers the body the possibility of entering into the invisibility of painting.

One can hear the echo of Bruce Nauman’s steps as he walks across the floor of his studio in his video Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) or as he forces his own body, then the visitor’s, within the narrow confines of his Performance Corridor (1969)3. The narrowness of the corridor engenders anxiety: the work is experience. For Everett, it is a question of making that part of the invisible that is conquered day after day in the practice of the studio palpable, through the gestures and the bodily situations in which he engages. His paintings are the trace of this effort, a force that surprises even itself. ‘Over the years an autonomous presence that has risen up out of the practice, it is an evasive entity. This is also the same kind of energy that I look for in the paintings, a force that requires a certain level of invisibility to survive.’ This sedimentation of works and days magnetises the spaces of the wild: ‘I am constantly overwhelmed by color as it is always ahead of me, shrouded in the evershifting light source. It is the weight, volume and speed of color that I recognize and depend on in order to build the structure and surface of the painting.’ "The Winds" are an attempt to direct these untamed forces towards the potential of the imagination, hence towards a possibility of the future. For the violent dynamism of the wind can become constructive when its cosmic vortices accompany the metamorphoses of painting. Everett’s works become the terrain for this phenomenon to unfold. Entering them is to find yourself transformed.

Born in 1973 in Rochester, New York, Everett lives and works in Northern California. He has had solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; Office Baroque, Brussels; On Stellar Rays, New York; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; and White Columns, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions such at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Biennale of Painting, Museum DhondtDhaenens, Deurle, Belgium; Arndt Singapore; di Rosa, Napa; U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; and 303 Gallery, New York. Everett has received the SECA Art Award at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), the Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute (2013) and the San Francisco Artadia Award (2013). His monograph, Without an Audience, published by Altman Siegel and kamel mennour, Paris/London with contributions by Jenny Gheith, Jonathan Griffin, Hope Mohr and Liam Everett, is on display at the gallery.


1 All quotations from Liam Everett are from an email correspondence with the author between April and December 2018.
2 Michael Fried, Le Réalisme de Courbet, Gallimard, 1990.
3 Claudine Humblet, Bruce Nauman, Skira, 2011.










Today's News

January 27, 2019

The Royal Academy of Arts brings together the work of Bill Viola and Michelangelo

Banksy work stolen from Paris terror attack venue

'Discriminating Thieves: Nazi-Looted Art and Restitution' opens at Nelson-Atkins

Bob Dodge to debut Jan. 28 as guest appraiser on HISTORY Channel's 'Pawn Stars'

Oscar-winning French composer Michel Legrand dies aged 86

Journalist, screenwriter donates his papers to the Harry Ransom Center

Exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of American artist Jacob Lawrence's printmaking oeuvre

Underground in Jerusalem, a rare look at an ancient tomb

A complete archive of Supreme skate decks sells for $800,000

Phoenix Art Museum presents global exhibition on art and Islam spanning a millennium

Medieval Africa as a cultural force is subject of major exhibition at Block Museum

Kamel Mennour opens its third solo exhibition of the work of Liam Everett

Exhibition features works from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Collection with a focus on new acquisitions

HOME opens a new solo exhibition by British artist David Bethell

Exhibition features huge canvases, expansive, room-filling installations and exceptionally large drawings

Exhibition brings together works by 6 artists who trace their origins to India, Pakistan and Iran

Kunsthaus Centre d'art Pasquart opens an exhibition of works by Zara Idelson

Gosport Gallery opens exhibition of works by Martin Snape

Exhibition revisits the controversial 1968 showing at the de Young Museum of 'Black Panthers'

Lunds konsthall opens 'Remembering What Is: Chile's Recent History in Film and Art'

The Grand Rapids Art Museum exhibits works of art acquired in the past five years

Ponti Art Gallery presents Italian masterpieces from 18th century to 20th century

New York-based painter Richard Tinkler opens exhibition at Team (gallery, inc.)

Focus Iran 3 offers views into the lives of contemporary Iranian youth through photography and video

Driving in UAE: Travel safety & road rules




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful