Between two fires, be the one who lights up
Group Show
Nathalie Campion, Garnier & Linker, Pao Hui Kao, Ernst Gamperl, Kaspar Hamacher, Amy Hilton, Noro Khachatryan, Isaac Monté, Mathieu Peyroulet, Païvi Rintaniemi, Kustaa Saksi, Bela Silva, Jacqueline Surdell, Ann Beate Tempelhaug, Fabian Von Spreckelsen
Painting and drawing are omnipresent in the creations of the artists of the Spazio Nobile gallery, who draw on both Western and Eastern thought through the contemporary applied arts. Magnifying the gesture and sublimating the material, feeling and spirituality are at the heart of British artist Amy Hilton’s colourful dry pastels, Norwegian artist Ann Beate Tempelhaug’s porcelain and abstract stoneware and French artist Mathieu Peyroulet’s watercolours on Japanese paper. The monolithic sculptures in Noir de Mazy by Armenian designer Noro Khachatryan are versatile pieces of furniture, archetypal forms revealing the microcrystalline beauty of an exceptional Belgian marble, extracted from a prehistoric rock such as obsidian from volcanoes. The molten glass Diatomées by the French duo Garnier & Linker also connect us to this mineral and marine world, as do the crystallizations by the Belgian Isaac Monté and the enamelled stoneware sculptures by the Portuguese artist Bela Silva, which embrace the plant and animal world and reenchant it. Kaspar Hamacher’s monoxylean creations, sculpted with fire, take the eye out of the opacity of the undergrowth into a fertile rebirth, also connecting the earth and the universe; the compositions in tracing paper and rice glue by Pao Hui Kao from Taiwan play with emptiness and fullness with the elegance of an Urushi lacquer brush. From an interior landscape, oscillating between presence and absence, the gaze moves to the back of the set to the two large three-dimensional tapestries by Finnish artist Kustaa Saksi and American Jacqueline Surdell, weaving links between the Tree of Life and the vast escapes that stretch out before us like great American landscapes that are both living and symbolic: «in-betweens» in which an interaction between immobile objects and the human soul is manifested, animated by a sudden and profound energy. «Between two fires» as the Chinese thinker of the French Academy François Cheng wrote, there is this «breath» that awakens the spirit and leads it on a path, towards the light. Lise Coirier, September 2021.