DANIEL DEZEUZE : Mesoamerica Lost Cities and Last Refuges
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
Galerie Templon is dedicating its spring show in Paris to the founding member of the avant-garde movement Supports/Surface, Daniel Dezeuze. Now 82, he is showing his latest work, which encompasses sculptures, paintings, drawings, and an installation. The exhibition opened on March 2nd and will conclude on April 27th, 2024.
Mesoamerica is a personal reflection inspired by Daniel Dezeuze's travels to Mexico and local Maya architecture. Daniel Dezeuze visited Mexico for the first time in the mid-1960s. The year he spent there proved to be a lasting influence. His latest works, wall assemblages made using offcuts of painted wood, hark back to the pivotal experience in the jungle, home to long-gone civilizations. The ground floor of the exhibition features a "negotiating table" surrounded by an installation of "weapons" and "shields," evoking the tensions between nature and culture.
Toutes les images / All images :© Courtesy de l’artiste et TEMPLON, Paris —Brussels — New York
Indigenous people and colonizers. The simplicity of the artist's chosen materials, wood, mesh, and corks, and the delicacy of the way he combines them offer a disturbing exploration of the frontiers between art and crafts, the untouched and the policed, as well as the fragility of civilizations and modernity. In contrast, the gallery basement is inhabited by a collection of drawings Daniel Dezeuze has put together, a jungle of flowers, insects, mosquitoes, and snails. Bordering on the abstract, the series of pieces depicts fragile yet untameable nature, illustrating the artist's obsession with "capturing the uncapturable.” Daniel Dezeuze has spent almost fifty years deconstructing the notion of painting, exploring its traditional techniques and materials in a quest to delve into the role, history, and practice of painting. The impulse to spurn the canvas began very early on in his career: he flipped ped stretchers against the wall, playing with empty spaces and three dimensionality to push the boundaries of artistic traditions. His work is steeped in craftwork practices and anthropology, reflecting his interest in nomadic and non European cultures. His remarkable journey has led him to experiment with what is seen as “poor” materials —wood, gauze, net, and fabric, as well as subverted objects. His oeuvre has heavily influenced new generations of European artists, and features in numerous public collections, including at the Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musée Fabre in Montpellier, Carré d’Art in Nîmes and Musée d’Art Contemporain (MAC) in Marseille.
About the Artist:
Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in the southern French port town of Sète. His work has been widely exhibited since the 1970s in France and internationally. The Musée de Grenoble held a retrospective of his art in 2017, while the FRAC Occitanie in M Montpellier held an exhibition of his drawings in 2015. MAMAC in Nice (2012), Centrale Electrique in Brussels (2009) and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2009) have also shown his work. In 2008, he exhibited his entire oeuvre at the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète.
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His art has featured in a wide variety of group exhibitions: at Collection Lambert in Avignon in 2022, FRAC Poitou Charentes in 2020, Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte -Croix in Les Sables d’Olonne (MASC) and MOCAD in Detroit, USA, in 2019, Carré d’Art in Nîmes In 2017, Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2015, Villa Datris in L’Isle sur la Sorgue, Musée du Louvre Lens and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg in 2014, Musée Picasso in Antibes and Centre Pompidou Metz in 2013, MAMAC in Nice in 2012, Centrale El ectrique in Brussels, Belgium, in 2009 and Fundació Suñol in Barcelona, Spain, in 2007. Daniel Dezeuze has been represented by Galerie Templon since 1999.
For more information about this exhibit and other exhibits at the Templon Gallery, please visit their website here. Also, find the Gallery on Instagram and Artsy.
