ART VITAM: NEW YORK IN JUNE
MIAMI GALLERY BRINGS FRESH FRENCH SUNSHINE
TO THE AFFORDABLE ART FAIR IN NEW YORK CITY
Friday, June 16 ? Sunday, June 18, 2006
Metropolitan Pavilion at 125 West 18th Street
Booth A-207
New York City, NY ?- Art Vitam shifts venues this June from Miami's palm trees
to New York City' skyscrapers, taking part in one of the hottest art fairs
on the planet: The Affordable Art Fair (June 16?18, 2006).
Sophie and Arnaud Blachet, both French, will present new works by a handful
of their artists established both in the US and in Europe: Michaël Baigneaux,
Mathilde Denis, Matthew Rose, Claire Jeanine Satin, and Christina Stahr. The
2006 edition of the AAF NYC is Art Vitam's first foray into this well-respected
international art fair. The Blachets launched Art Vitam in Miami's Go-Go Wynwood
Art District in 2002, and quickly set about exhibiting a range of young artists
working in collage, photography, book-works, and drawing. "We have organized
approximately eight exhibitions per year with artists we feel draw inspiration
from across conceptual disciplines, continents and cultures," says Sophie
Blachet. "For the last four years, we've worked consistently with a dozen
artists ? Michaël Baigneaux, Maxime Dautresme, Mathilde Denis, Frédéric
Lemoine, Alfredo Lopez, Lorent Matagne, Jacques Pzrybylka, Matthew Rose, Claire
Jeanine Satin, Henri Touitou and Christina Stahr ? emerging mid-career artists
who, in their own way have reinvented traditional mediums ? collage, drawing,
painting, photography - and exploited the sense and sensibility of the art
object and its expectations, to push forward wor d, image and presentation,"
says Arnaud Blachet.
Art & Collectors & Artists With An Edge
"Art Vitam is the only Florida gallery chosen to participate in the AAF
NYC," notes Sophie Blachet. "We are very happy to be representing
Florida in New York City this June. New York is clearly the center of the
contemporary art world, a universe of art and young and seasoned collectors.
Several of our artists, notably Claire Jeanine Satin and Matthew Rose, have
established careers and their works have been acquired for permanent collections
in various museums."
Michaël Baigneaux | Graphologie VII Michaël Baigneaux, born in
1972 near the Mediterranean coast in France, has long reworked the aesthetics
of writing, turning it into the visual focus of a coded and expansive language.
"James Joyce's Ulysses," he notes, "is obviously a great influence
because in this novel language and writing become the heros of the book."
For AAF NYC, Baigneaux's "decoded" artworks take writing to a new
level, offering the viewer/reader an approach to the work that literally steps
out and off the page.
Michaël BAIGNEAUX ? Graphologie VII ? Ink on paper ? 12 ¾ x 16
½ in. [framed]
Christina Stahr has no sacred cows when making work from rare and vintage
books, cutting up choice bits and, like an alchemist, spinning rare and raucous
works layered with gold leaf, fabric and pop materials. Her limited editions
are unusual books that blend writing, music and image so that the act of turning
the page is the significant experience and reading is elevated to a kind of
visual banquet. Indeed, in Stahr's "Chocolate Collages," a suite
of works assembled from the wrappers of chocolates she has eaten, consciously
recalls Kurt Schwitters' obsessions. They combine commercially printed and
fine art papers with aluminum wrappers and 24k gold leaf, playing on contrasts
of color and texture. Her Chocolate Obsession series, like the Book series,
investigates the marketing and packaging of luxury consumer goods and the
pleasures they promise. Christina STAHR | Spirit Seeker
Christina STAHR ? Spirit Seeker ? Mixed media collage ? 24 x 18 in. [framed]
Claire Jeanine SATIN | JCMCJJ / Dancers on a Plane VI Claire Jeanine Satin
is known especially for her conceptual works influenced by the ideas of composer
and visual artist John Cage. She converts ordinary industrial materials into
environmental constructions and book-works of layered transparent mass. "Discarding
the idea of the book as a linear form with a fixed sequence and narrative,
I have chosen a more complex temporal, textual, spatial invention of interdependent
meaning-making thought," she says. "For me, the 'book' can take
on forms that do not involve ordinary 'reading' practices such as those found
in codices , scrolls, tablets, etc., or ordinary materials such as paper,
velum, etc. My work becomes a book the instant one recognizes its potential
?to be read'." Satin's works can be found in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, London; the Getty Center, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Modern Art,
NYC, NY; the American Centers in New Delhi and Bombay, India; the Ruth and
Marvin Sackner Archives of Concrete and Visual Poetry; and the Library of
Congress Rare Books Collection, among others.
Claire Jeanine SATIN ? JCMCJJ / Dancers on a Plane VI
Steel, metallic ink, handwritten text, brass filings, braided wire ? 5 ½
x 9 ½ in.
Mathilde DENIS | Enlèvement des Bagages Mathilde Denis's approach
to art making is not unlike Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ? a
deep exploration of doubt, spirit and relationships that unfolds in a brilliant
adventure of consciousness ? and in particular, a female consciousness. In
this French woman's large-scale collage works, one is confronted with a journey
that is often punctuated with continuous invention with light, color, surface,
and the difficult effort for clarity. For Denis, the act of composition is
somewhat magical, where the materials ? boards, bits of paper, and other ephemera
? are recovered and oft en rescued from other worlds ? the street, bookshelves,
the wastepaper basket ? and then applied onto canvas, to then be covered up
with paint, stripped down, and recovered, a process she likens to unpeeling
the layers of her "self." Her works are a kind of performance where
in her words, she "loses the balance and finds it again?to strive not
to see it?to endanger myself?to lay myself bare."
Mathilde DENIS ? Enlèvement des Bagages ? Mixed media collage ? 31
½ x 31 ½ in.
Matthew ROSE | A Perfect Friend #37 Matthew Rose, an American who has lived
in Paris for a dozen years, has exhibited his collages, prints, drawings,
books and objects in Europe and the US for many years. His work is collected
throughout Europe and the US, and can be found in the permanent collection
of The Boca Raton Museum (FL) among others. Combining vintage and popular
images to produce contemporary tales that are both Pop and poignant, the artist
selects visual and verbal phrases, using them then out of context. His "stories"
are rhyming fragments that mimic contemporary consciousness playing itself
out in a surreal fashi on, as in his series, "A Perfect Friend,"
where sex and identity are typically mixed in startling ways: a snarling English
setter's head is perfectly placed upon the elegant torso of a 17th century
Dutch portrait; a man plumbs his own vagina; a startled hostess balances a
head of plates on her neck, a porn queen balances a kitten on her head. The
artist cites the late artist Ray Johnson, whom he called both a friend and
teacher, as one of his main influences, along with Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst,
Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns and various Fluxus artworkers. Some of Rose's
more conceptual text works, such as the "withdrawing" drawing, needlepoint
works, like "Communism," (produced by the artist's mother), and
found sculptures including "Chez Giselle," also push the bounds
of word and image.
Matthew ROSE ? A Perfect Friend #37 ? Digital print 1/3 [signed] ? 16 x 12
½ in.
Art Vitam invites the New York public and friends to join in a great celebration
this June.
Where: Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th Street
New York City, NY
[Booth A-207]
When : Friday, June 16
Saturday, June 17
Sunday, June 18 12 noon - 8 pm
12 noon - 8 pm
11 am - 5 pm
General Admission: $12
(Seniors/Students $9 - Children under 12 FREE)
For half-price invitations, please email here (only few invitations left)
Cocktail Preview Reception:
Thursday, June 15 6pm - 9pm
Tickets are $25 advance purchase and $35 at the door
To purchase tickets, please email here or contact the fair office at 212-255-2003
Art Vitam:
AAF NYC : http://www.artvitam.com/
http://www.aafnyc.com/
Contact:
For information and images:
Sophie Blachet
T. +1 305-571-8342
E. info@artvitam.com
ART VITAM
P.O. Box 190975 | Miami Beach, FL 33119-0975
T. 305-571-8342 | F. 305-571-8352