Melanie Matranga was born in 1985 in Marseille. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 2011. In 2014, she was awarded the Frieze Artist Award and was nominated for the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard prize in the same year, as well as the Aware prize in 2018. She is represented by the galleries High Art (Paris, Arles, FR) and Karma International (Zurich, CH). Her work, which combines installations, sculptures, and films, has been the subject of several solo shows, notably at the Palais de Tokyo (2015), Villa Vassiliev (2018), and in her French and Swiss galleries. She uses language as a witness, approaching it through appropriations (personal narratives, pieces of music…) or direct messages integrated into her works. Her relationship to space, altered through a sensitive apprehension of its architecture or luminous perception, disturbs the visit and enhances the dreamlike sensation of the exhibition Éveillée.
In residence at Passages, artists Sarah Holveck and Florent Dégé explore a project between text and drawing, working together in the Centre d’art contemporain’s apartment. Both are interested in drawing, and for Passages they make it the heart of their subject. Their practice confronts, intertwines and experiments.
The exhibition “Sauge” brings together fifteen artworks in the space of the art center, marked by the domestic characteristics of a late 19th-century mansion.
Marie-Mam Sai Bellier and Clara Pasteau are two graphic designers who met during their studies at the Beaux-Arts in Lyon. They are currently redesigning the visual identity of “Passages,” which originates from an environment observation residency at the art center. The launch of this new graphic design and the new website is planned for September 2023.
Based on a set of specifications, their travels across the Aubois region, and their interactions with local cultural figures (historians, artisans, specialized production entities, etc.), their focus has been on two main aspects:
Starting from January 27, 2023, discover “Plus haut tremble,” a solo exhibition by Marine Wallon.
Following her exhibition at the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, the artist is pursuing a two-month residency in the same line as the works shown in February 2022. A graduate of the École des Beaux arts de Nantes in 2012, Irma Kalt pursues her artistic research within various collectives such as Second Kiss Company (Nantes, Paris, Beijing) and Silence Forêt (Nantes, Berlin, Beijing). Through various residencies, a network of artistic research affinities has been forged across Asia and Europe: 798 art center in Beijing, China, Art in Nature in Busan, South Korea, Atelier Nimmanhaemin in Chiangmai, Thailand, Treptow Atelier in Berlin, Germany. In parallel with her artistic work, she has the pleasure of regularly intervening in schools with the support of the Frac des Pays de la Loire, as well as in art schools: Nancy, Nantes, Metz, Quimper, Beijing.
First presented at the Villa du Parc and then at the Biennale d’art contemporain in Lyon three years ago, the artist reactivates the Bouilleur de Savon project in a new form at Passages. For Troyes, the idea is to start recycling the three-tonne puddle to produce a series of sculptures and an artist’s soap edition. This participatory project invites 28 artists and associations to provide illustrations for the production of stamps. We find : Anita Molinero, Antoine Grulier, Antwan Horfee, Bruno Peinado, Cecile Pancafe, Ceel Mogami de Haas, cONcErn, Daniel Otero Torres, Fabienne Radi, Florent Meng, François Durif, Gaëlle Choisne, Haydée Marin Lopez & Camille Besson, John Fou, Jules Dumoulin, Le Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, Lyla Marson, Mario Picardo, Mathieu Mercier, Nina Childress, Pablo Tomek, Pauline d’Andigné, Renaud Loda, Romain Sarrot, Samy San, SKKI©, Thomas Koening et Alice Guittard, la Villa du Parc avec un design d’Ismaël Abdallah et Constance Jacob.
Winner of the Ateliers Médicis’ Création en Cours 2022 program and in collaboration with the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, Yan Tomaszewski was able to benefit from a creative and research residency as part of a transmission program at the École Jean Moulin in La Chapelle-Saint-Luc. A graduate of Le Fresnoy, the artist creates investigations, often structured by myths, through the prism of sculpture and film. Imagination and reverie are an integral part of the artist’s questioning. Always experimenting, he tries to bring new techniques into his practice, as is currently the case with fire art.
For his solo show at Passages, Yan Tomaszewski has linked works from several of his projects. Usually working in large sets anchored in specific contexts, the artist creates sculptural worlds and films intertwining mythology with reality.
Le Centre d’art contemporain / Passages has been in existence for 40 years, thanks to its founding members: Dominique Letscher, Guy Mansuy, Françoise Balboni-Gibert, Roger Balboni, and Martine Rog.
We invite you to discover all the week from May 9 to 14, 2022,
the work of PAG students (Global Artistic Projects), as well as productions
as well as productions made during workshops
by the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages.
The exhibition is a selection of work by students at the École supérieure d’art et de design de Reims, France.
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exhibition
March 18 – April 01, 2022
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Je me sens comme une surface imaginaire is an exhibition
by 2nd and 3rd year Art students at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design
d’Art et de Design de Reims, as part of a course taught by
by Gérard Cairaschi, Jean-Michel Hannecart and Vanessa Morisset.
At the suggestion of Metz-based Galerie Modulab, father and daughter set up a discussion between their two practices. At the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, harmony is created by a scenography devised by curator Aurélie Amiot and the artists.
The artist works in the fields of photography and drawing. He is renowned for his Nuit Américaine photographic series, a technique derived from cinema and adapted to photography, enabling him to establish a new narrative for his decontextualized characters. He generally operates by elaborating a new scenario for an image in transit, and over the past five years, he has taken a step aside in his photographic career, gradually becoming a true visual artist.
Alternately graphic designer and painter, these two creators have confronted their two practices in their exhibitions.
The Nantes-born artist immerses his work in tensions and paradoxes: nature/architecture, intuition/reason, discursivity/poetry.
Exhibition from Friday, April 02 to Friday, May 14, 2021 (opening subject to health conditions – health crisis period)
In the manner of a journeyman’s tour of France, Simon Nicaise embarks on several long-term residencies, with the opportunity to relocate his practice and discover new skills.
What interests Aliénor Wlschbillig is the unexpected emergence, exit or expulsion of a material that rushed out of a place from which it was not visible. Above all, she likes to share the birth of a form that modifies space and enters into full resonance with it… Indeed, it is in the sensitive interaction of fullness and tenuous emptiness, where opposites coexist, touch and penetrate, that Aliénor finds the principal material for her creation.
“… Painting is performance, ritual, living…”.
Félix Bressieux’s paintings are based on a simple, uncluttered language. It’s a protocol-driven process in which the artist remains in the background, letting the dance of a protagonist gesture create and recreate itself. He uses schemas, mathematical and logical systems, sometimes borrowed, sometimes improvised. These schemes and systems organize shapes and colors to extract their essence and strength. The paintings evoke the appearance of scientific experiments, organic images that suggest the existence of a living, self-sufficient universe in each canvas. It’s the research and study of color, of the emotions it arouses, of what is visible and invisible, as seen through a microscope.
Whether prints or projections… the members of the Trakif graphic and multimedia development studio like to understand, define and reveal. Stirred by exchange and participation, their devices are distinguished by their inciting, playful and immersive character. The “in-house” design of visual systems and digital instruments leads the people of Lyon towards objects that are far from expected, and the situations are never repeated, as their processes meet with each intervention and renew plasticity.
Jef Geys is a confirmed Belgian artist. In 2009, he represented his country at the Venice Biennale.
Since the 1950s, his work has been an ongoing exchange between the personal and the universal. He meticulously keeps an inventory, from which he draws, to create new narratives around three fundamental axes: his environment, his private life and his relationship with the outside world. Since birth, his life has been in Kempens: the name of the region that is also, by extension, Kempens. Informatieblad, the name of the newspaper in which Jeff Gens began working and which he has adopted as the artistic medium for his research. Jeff Gens likes to multiply his experiences: working with neighborhood committees, taking part in strikes, leading a political party and mixing the notions of minor and major art… experiences that aim to propose forms of transmission, or even apprenticeship.
Painting, sculpture, collage, sound, statement, Marc Rebollo uses a multitude of mediums, sources and references linked mainly to music, with which he deploys a mise en tension. In 2014, for his “Sold out” exhibition at the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, he produced an instrumental sound work conceived as a soundtrack engraved on vinyl and printed in 300 copies. Like an echo, two years later, Marc Rebollo is once again invoking the multiple for his residency, but this time in the form of a silkscreen project produced in collaboration with the Trojan workshop Oasp, whom he met on his wanderings around the city of the tricasses.
The exhibition Aniline Black, conceived specifically for the Centre d’art contemporain Passages by Élodie Lesourd, is both an exploration of the different facets of her work and an invitation to trace the genealogy of the site and the painting itself. Taking as its starting point the history of the building and its links to the hosiery industry, and more specifically to the preparation of black inverdissable dye, the project unfolds a whole chromatic reflection around the desire to fix the ephemeral.
Born in 1985 in Reims, Delphine Gatinois is a graduate of the Épinal and Metz art schools. Working back and forth between France and West African countries such as Mali and Senegal, the artist reflects on the world through myth. Her main fields of practice are photographic staging and installation in the plastic sense of the term.
Jagna Ciuchta was born in 1977 in Nowy Dwor Mazowiecki, Poland. Today, she lives and works in Paris, developing a protean and processual practice, linked to the very status of the exhibition. From January onwards, she will be in cross-residence, enabling her to work directly in the spaces of the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages, in order to create a proposal that responds to the specificity of this venue.
Jagna Cicuta was born in 1977 in NOWY DWOR MAZOWIECKI, Poland. Now living and working in Paris, she is developing a protean and processual practice, linked to the very status of the exhibition. She deals both with the forms used to represent works of art – such as displays and documentation – and with the question of authority inherent in an exhibition produced in a given context.
“You have to see it to believe it”. Well no, with Sophie Hasslauer, you have to look at it to know that you shouldn’t believe it… well no, you have to look at it to know that you shouldn’t believe it, but in fact you have to believe it. Limits are a matter of education, we know. And in art too. Doesn’t reality appear when there’s nothing left to see? Isn’t this what Sophie Hasslauer’s practice is all about?
So why does she give so much to see? It’s a pretext! Yes, a smokescreen, a deception, a form, a color, a thickness, a weight, a reality in place, but one that speaks only of that which cannot be palpated, gives thickness to the air, shows the invisible, tells things, criticizes, grumbles or sleeps. Sophie Hasslauer is a painter. She shows objects, but what really interests her is painting, another oddity. “No”, she says, “it’s not odd, it’s in the process, I’m looking for what in the elaboration and presentation of the object is painting”.
Un passage à bout portant is an exhibition idea put forward by Giuseppe Gabelle and Guillaume Leblon, teachers at Ésad de Reims. It involves a dozen students from the art section of the École supérieure d’art et de design, chosen for the quality of their work, whose principle is to create the conditions for their projection into a professional environment, such as that of the Centre d’art contemporain Passages.
“The exhibition brings together the film Arrangements (2012) and the installation Home-Scape (2005). The former follows the transformations of a small house through the 20th century to the present day. Entirely realized in the studio, it places the notion of décor at the center of autobiographical and historical interrogations. Until she was a teenager, Hélène Agofroy lived opposite the factory to which her house was attached. From these memories, she has extracted an element, the only one to have survived the end of the textile industry: this small building, now relocated at the foot of tennis courts, a kind of “house-witness” to the transition from industry to leisure. As for Home-Made (2003), an envelope containing a cardboard model of the house mentioned above was given to each participant, who took it with them on their travels. They were then invited to build it and position it in the places or situations of their choice, documenting their action with photos or videos posted on the dedicated website. ”
“Mehryl Ferri Levisse is not a photographer, but photography plays an important role in his artistic work. This technique, which he calls “captationphotographique”, enables him to offer almost documentary traces of events in time, in the intimacy of his studio. A space he calls the theater of all his thoughts and fantasies, in which he constructs, on a scale of 1, contexts in which he stages the body. Closed, doorless and windowless are the images of his dreams, in which it is impossible to hold on to a material reality. His large-format photographic recordings create a direct frontal relationship between the body presented and the body of the viewer. By choosing to display these prints in the space of the Centre d’Art Contemporain /Passages in a horizontal arrangement, rather than opting for a conventional hanging, he proposes to create a stronger intimacy between the viewer and the viewed. You are cordially invited to move around, look at and apprehend the visual proposition, whose links and layout are not lost on the distracted eye.”
… framing a void studded with paint stains and dust on the negative… alchemy in the surprise of failures… chance in the emulsified meanders of powder and watery secretions stirred up with a brush… this is beyond aesthetics, it’s an ethical position, difficult to hold, but one that Nadine Monnin pursues without concession. Take it or leave it, there’s never any pretense, no plastic effects, no emphasis on image. Always the tightest, the most modest. So, let’s go for the worst. That’s our truth.
a) …encountering corpus 29 473 with the woodwork of the Centre d’art contemporain Passages, or a visit to a natural history museum in the process of moving, in any case a desire for total non-astentation, if the images are present everywhere, consulting them is uncomfortable, requires effort, they are arranged, sorted or piled up, the walls used like the pages of a book, possibly displayed in an unfinished scenography…
Élise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky’s wandering fieldwork, attentive to manifestations of the irrational, the resurgence of myths and mechanisms of resistance, is expressed in all kinds of audio-visual forms: structural, narrative or hypnotic. Operating by successive disjunctions between what is said and what is seen, their research questions the construction of a multiple self through different contexts: geographical, historical and political.
Magali Crasset trained as an industrial designer. In the image of one of her emblematic objects, the hospitality column “Quand Jim monte à Paris”, she has developed her own methodology in which she questions the obviousness of the codes that govern our daily lives, the better to free herself from them and experiment.
In 2010, Andra / Agence nationale pour la gestion des déchets radioactifs launched a major multidisciplinary project on the memory of radioactive waste disposal centers. Art is one of the avenues being explored. To this end, Andra has entered into a 3-year partnership with the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages de Troyes. It involves the funding of a grant and an artists’ residency in Troyes.
“Do we know exactly what inspires us? Inspiration is, in a way, a non-discernible artistic urge, given its mysterious origin. Whereas a pregnant woman’s urge, despite its equally mysterious origin, will never merit the term inspiration.
In short, I think this particular house, built in 1862 for a hosiery industrialist, inspired me. This house, even when refurbished as a contemporary art center and thus neutralized in its “animism”, suggested this exhibition to me.
A fireplace, wood panelling or a picturesque, typical or stylish terrazzo floor are preserved here, as you wish and according to your own taste. No doubt these beautiful traces of an era on the verge of being beautiful have sent me back to my own, and I’ve been thinking about equally stylish sculptures from 1995 to 2003, which I’m delighted to see installed on the mantelpiece or in the conservatory. But, as decorating consultants say, the old goes with the contemporary and, as sentimentalists say, the present is often contained in the past. So, on the other hand, I made a wall, a huge, ravaged, flamboyant relief, a scab, the kind that sizzles under laziness.”
For Morgane Tschiemer, the exhibition is an opportunity to bring her own pieces back into play, to reconstruct and reinterpret them. The Space Oddity exhibition is conceived as a context of revelation.
Space Oddity extends the research begun with Folded Spaces and Unspecific Spaces. The working protocol is that of a laboratory. The ensemble is envisaged as a specific temporal space, at once a culmination and a beginning, a transition and a metaphor for place, understood as a physical and mental space, where thought circulates and is transmitted.
The proposal for Passages, center d’art contemporain is directly in line with my research into formatting and behavior. These works have led me to develop spaces, sculptures, scores or, as today, environments based on the idea of sound.
“phonons and photons beam” illustrates the wave-corpuscle duality of sound and light. Phonon (from the ancient Greek phonê, voice) designates a quantum of vibrational energy, a quality in common with the photon, which is a “packet” of elementary energy, endowed with nodular behavior, and simultaneously having corpuscular properties.
Veit Stratmann’s approach revolves around a reflection on space and its use. His works are generally closely linked to the places where the artist is invited to intervene. Their dimensions, the neutrality of their shapes and colors, the materials used and their positioning generate “devices” that can sometimes resemble unlikely street furniture, engaging his culture of space.
“There’s a strange, nagging pleasure in coming face to face with a work of art, a curious exhilaration in entering a space like going on a first date, full of longing and apprehension. Fear that everything will go wrong. Hoping it will sweep you off your feet. Entering an exhibition by Sarah Fauguet and David Cousinard instantly soothes our aesthetic fears, before immersing us in the magma of a world closing in behind us. The encounter is like diving into thick, murky water. And everything goes wrong, and we’re swept away. Their generous work doesn’t inhabit the space, it turns it upside down, skins it, prevents it, counters the permanence of the place to replay it in its entirety. It asserts a presence that shakes our certainties about what we expect from art. Clearly, all this is not a charming rendezvous, it’s a head-on collision that leaves its mark on the mind.”
Veit Stratmann, a visual artist, was the first to examine the subject. At the end of 2011, he submitted his report entitled “The Hill”. To combat memory loss, he proposes a ritual every 30 years. The final cover of the storage centers would be raised regularly. At the end of 300 years of monitoring, the final cover would reach a height of 57 meters and become a hill.
Natures mortes is an original series of events based on a unifying theme, designed to bring together contemporary works with the collections of the Musée des Beaux-arts and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Troye.
“When Dominique De Beir pierces her cardboard boxes, she doesn’t totally ruin the notion of painting, but rather puts them in crisis. Indeed, what is a painting where there is nothing to see, where the gaze falls into sock traps? What a thing is,” writes Aristotle, “is always determined by its function: for a thing is truly itself when it can perform its function, an eye, for example, when it can see; on the contrary, the thing incapable of performing its function exists only by homonymy, for example a dead eye or an eye of stone, just as a saw of wood is no more a saw in painting. “These are not mere surfaces, like a painting, a fresco, a sheet of paper or a wooden panel; they are surfaces that criticize themselves as such, i.e. that are based on their own crisis. Indeed, they call for touch as much as life, to caress these holes which are often, at the same time, protuberances. As Dominique de Beir reads Braille, the tactile dimension of her works takes on a particular relief. It’s the whole body that takes over: the impotent eye gives way to the hand.”
“Can I claim to be living in my time by taking an interest in ancient figures?
What is my relationship with the past, with my past?
What is our relationship with history? How does history shape us?
To what extent do the past and cultural history shape us?
Can we imagine a being without culture?
Culture for whom?
Art for what?”
“We are four visual artists.
Each CLARA encounter goes beyond the sum of our individual practices to achieve a collective force. Our actions are not guided by words, but by urgency and a constantly renewed attention to context.
For the first CLARA exhibition, we present Sans préméditions. This installation is the result of a series of collective actions carried out from May 12 to 20 in the art center. The materials, provided in part by patrons and partner companies, were also found on site, during the installation of the exhibition.
The installation takes into account the entirety of the art center’s spaces.”
“An existential reflection, supported by psychoanalytical theory, fuels my artistic commitment …
“… references to our dreams, our images, our fantasies, our culture, our desires, everything mixes and intertwines, one object next to another, the artist proceeds from images superimposed layer upon layer …”
Éric Fournel is a freelance graphic designer and works under the Éric Fournel & Cie identity on projects with other studios (architect, designer, photographer, etc.) to cover all creative fields, and thus best respond to multi-disciplinary projects.
Christopher Varady-Szabo is a Canadian artist living in Gaspésie, Québec. Exploring concepts of inhabitation and architectural systems, he creates ephemeral installations that aim to reveal the relationship between being and environment. His sculptures are inspired by primitive structures, and to design them, he borrows and adapts authentic traditional construction methods.
This new body of work finds its meaning through links between forms produced by these traditional primitive construction techniques and objects from domestic life. In a context revealing a parasitic and territorial cohabitation, the resulting fusions and inlays will give rise to a body of hybrid works and installations, taking on the appearance of a fabulous new living species…
For the Passages contemporary art center in Troyes, Rémy Marot is showing 2 series of photographs and a selection of videos, most of which have never been shown before.
“There is life
There is the autumn sun
There are men
There are women
The sweet grapes
The golden trees
Oil lakes and quiet mountains…
And snowy peaks.
Explain my approach?
I’m not sure I can.
On what pleases and delights me?
See below, and so on…
About my obsessions?
Let’s keep it modest, I don’t spread my life around, I’m not sure anyone would be interested.
About the paintings I present at “voeux d’artistes”?
They’re too recent, so let’s let the poetry of things misunderstood live on,
Let the dark sky fill with stars,
And our brains sailing in the pink clouds of the irrational.
RUDOLF: you stick a needle in a piece of tapestry, a white thread in the cat’s eye, and voila, it’s all there.
The needle, and voilà, you have a painting. But what does it really mean?
is it ridiculous?
BERTA: Well, you see, you’re the one who says it best!
Ridiculous is a very interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.
What else do you want to know?
“The 8 paintings for sale are all almost square, i.e. 23.9 x 24.8 centimetres.
The piece at 75 euros” ”
As part of an artist exchange with Belgium, the Cadran Solaire invites Jacques VHARLIER to create a special installation entitled “L’Enfer des Images”.
“Nowadays, the expansion of “in situ” international exhibition practices and art market exchanges tend to turn artists into eternal travelers, like the great painter-decorators of past centuries who went from court to court and castle to castle… The works I produce are therefore at once subject to the demands of a place – both geographical and historical. But at the same time, they are so independent of this place, that they display the way in which they will be moved for the next presentation…”
The desire of a number of partners to present a major exhibition devoted to Gina Pane stems from the same concern for a privileged apprehension of a work whose actions have not ceased to nourish contemporary art since the end of the sixties. At that time, Gina Pane’s research was rooted in body art. For this major event, we do not wish to use the overly monolithic term “retrospective”, but rather to evoke an articulation between two positions:
Re/reading the installations from the late sixties, situating the period of the actions through historical documentation (writings, photographs, correspondence), re/presenting the graphic works that materialized the conception and realization of the actions opposite other current graphic works proceeding from the same approach.
Reading of works dated between 1986 and 1990, including the installation “La prière des pauvres et le corps des Saints” (“The Prayer of the Poor and the Body of the Saints”) created specifically for the Sundial (Chapelle de l’Hôtel-Dieu) in Troyes.
Joaquim Facló draws objects using a plastic box with holes in it, through the bottom of which paint flows. His works produce a surprising sensation: the objects they represent seem as strongly present as if they themselves were springing up before our eyes for the first time. This effect is particularly intense when falcó depicts animals that we barely see in nature, whether they are fleeing or scaring us away.
In the works of the series entitled La Notte, Aki Kuroda has painted clues that we usually associate with the immensity of night. He has thus composed spaces in which illusions of depth, contradictory or elusive, give the vertiginous sensation of facing vast expanses, with no apparent limits.
1987 was the year of the Capetian millennium, the 10th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou and the centenary of Marcel Duchamp’s birth, all places and people that inspired the artist. 1987 was also the year of Raymond Hains’ first exhibition at the Centre d’art contemporain / Passages. The culmination of his Trojan excursions and research into the Trojan Horse or Troyes.
Masafumi Maita seeks to produce an image of water that is close to our perception of it.
