valentine meyer eng

146 eyes, 74 mouths

March 12 - April 16, 2016

For his fourth monographic exhibition at galerie Frederic Lacroix, Thomas Salet continues his research and crosses a course : the pleasure of bright colors. Here the series of footprints he leaves are neither repeated, holes, threads, but gestures of live painting. Between spontaneity and mastery (painted on small landscape formats), a serie of masks, dis-figured faces, re-figured, is facing us. More patterns than portraits, seriality is counterbalanced here by the sensuality and the embodied energy of oil painting. This immersion lices with the mate whiteness (that he has) often used for other series more Phantom like : one thinks for example of its organic ceramic sets. Some of these sculptures are present here, but in pink version. The work focused on its colors close to the fluorescent, flirting with this chromatic range used to claim our attention to a thing or a danger that we would otherwise certainly have missed. Like Pierrette Bloch, he doesn’t want to freeze things, and prefers to let the spectator free of his associations.

With « 174 eyes, 75 mouths » Thomas Salet creates this space of attention and questions, where meaning lent to the work can be done and undone. We are the free and necessary interpreters.

Valentine Mayer is a member of the AICA, and an independent exhibition curator. Art historian, she worked in Zurich for the Cabaret Voltaire, Dada Haus (Claude Lévêque, John Giorno, Zevs ...) and for the Architektur Forum.

She is currently the guest exhibition curator for the Swiss castle in the world, domaine de Penthes in Geneva, (Peter Knapp, Histoire en Briques Légo…) and is director of the artist residency program for the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris.