Twenty-five artists share their “Surfaces sans cible”

In the age of the smartphone, Instagram and self-destructing clichés, what is the artist’s place in a world where images are everywhere? This is the question posed by the exhibition “Surfaces sans cible”. At 22 Visconti, an exhibition space located in this small street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where Racine, Balzac and Delacroix stayed, curator Anaïd Demir invited twenty-five artists of all generations to present their mental images, at the initiative of Armelle Leturcq, founder of the magazine Blocnotes and Crash magazine. Sensitive surfaces” free of contexts, frames, or imposed targets that give rise to the manifesto “Surfaces without targets”. Even before entering the gallery, the visitor finds himself facing Gianni Motti’s portrait on the outside windows. These are his posters for the US presidential election campaign, a happening in 1996. Inside, the exhibition reads like a three-dimensional collage where the works meet and dialogue. Like Chris Burden’s “Dos Equis”, a small frame overlooking the sculptural photograph of young Alice Guittard. In front of “Post-image 003” by Wang Du, a modeling representing a compact crowd of photographers in front of the back of a squatting lady, young Araks Sahakyan delivers a series of performances using her naked back as the projection screen of a series of childhood photographs in Armenia. A work that resonates with his moving images exposed on the walls of the gallery, not far from Frank Perrin’s “Panoramic Obsessions”. If technology and networks have democratized photography, Marie Maillard makes it the vector of her vision: exposed on the ground, her work “UNIT 1512” can only be read entirely when viewed through a smartphone or a tablet. So when the visitor wants to draw his smartphone to capture, share these moments, the question arises: isn’t that stealing from “Surfaces sans cible” their primary vocation? To meditate until November 19.