PAZ CORONA – OLIVIER MOSSET

13 May - 18 June 2011 17 rue des Filles du Calvaire 75003 Paris

Olivier Mosset has long been known for his monumental monochromes, which he paints according to the period in pale or bright colors. Sometimes unsatisfied, he may cover the color with white as the series presented in 2001 at the gallery in duo with Steven Parrino who showed a black series. In a general way, Mosset diverts the artistic request, by invading, for example, the art center of Noisy-le-Sec with stones dismounted from the prison of the Bastille having been used as pedestals to the Maillol of the Tuileries and on which Brice Marden was drawn the portrait while associating himself for the exhibition with a draftsman of Muses of the XVIIIeme, Clarac. Just as he designed Toblerone sculptures, inspired by reinforced concrete anti-tank defenses that he bought from the Swiss cantons and that he turned into monumental three-ton ice cubes, whose water flows onto the floor of the Lyon Museum or the Basel Fair...

 

This time, Olivier Mosset invites an unknown artist: Paz Corona. In fact, she has never exhibited, it is her very first time, an opportunity that Mosset has already offered to artists such as Amy Granat or Sylvie Fleury. We could say that her work is placed in the opposite direction of Mosset's. She paints in oil on a raw canvas that she covers with figures on unfinished backgrounds. She paints with large strokes, sometimes violent and in certain monumental portraits beyond the painting appears the object aimed at (look, voice, the nothing). The language is neither expressionist nor strictly figurative, her painting is a matt, opaque material, worked almost without medium, sometimes removed as for a sculpture. Would I dare say a "painting without quality"? The nonsense is elaborated on the canvas as it can emerge from a text of Lewis Carroll. It gives to see the dissonance, the detail which is wrong; one could speak about failed portraits in the sense that the living is imperfect. If there is femininity in this work, it is in the "unfinished" and in the contingency confronted with the freedom of the decision.