ETIENNE VIARD
Sculptures
September 23 - October 31, 2021
Opening Thursday, September 23
The artists of the exhibition:
"The main thing is not to put notes but to remove them".
This aporia attributed to the composer Franz Listz could perfectly qualify the artistic approach of Etienne Viard.
Hollowing out and linking, enchanting and reducing, his sculpture has been redefining for more than thirty years a space according to the principles of imbalance and balance, of movement that seems caught in the moment, of materiality and lightness or even of duality, full and empty. , chords and disagreements, notes and timbres.
Thus, Etienne Viard inscribes a musical work that goes from tonal purity to resonance.
Neglecting the base, working in variations – in 2019 he produced a series of seven very large format works for the Pathline garden in the heart of Silicon Valley (California, USA). With an intimate minimal composition, his sculpture forms friezes which stretch on the ground like a lazy snake or on the contrary, by mimicry to organic growth, which grow in thick tufts by long steel rods towards the sky.
His new exhibition at the Berthet-Aittouares gallery announces a new bias that combines lightness and imbalance, fragments and spaces of fragile scope.
Produced in 2020 - 2021, these new works are initiated from scrap steel found in the workshop. Creations that sign invention and play; duality between chance and mastery. Thus, the sculptures of Etienne Viard are affiliated in echo with minimalist art - Joel Shapiro, Donald Judd or Anthony Caro - and, more surprisingly, with the famous paintings of the Alphabet Painting of the 1960s, black signs on a white background of the sculptor Jannis Kounellis.
With this exhibition Etienne Viard, “Sculptures”, the Berthet-Aittouarès gallery presents 25 sculptures. We will be able to detect a new desire there: to put down a note then another, to compose by vibration, chance and space binding here so well….
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Berthet-Aittouares Gallery
14 and 29 rue de Seine
Tuesday Saturday
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. / 2:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
The 1st Thursday of each month until 9 p.m.
T: +33 (0)1 43 26 53 09