«La main-pleur» at Kunsthalle Friart

La main-pleur proposes an encounter with the recent works of ten artists. With no constraints as to form or theme, the exhibition nevertheless carries with it the vague consistency of contemporaneity, offering different approaches to reshaping the distribution of the symbolic and the concrete. The artists often employ a manual approach, using natural, found, simple or poor materials. They leave aside accepted codes, instead starting out again from where they find themselves, seeking personal, collective, felt stories. The time of progress and overall perspectives is no more. Possible accounts fill an abstract void of alternatives and niche works fill the art space, spitting, overflowing, ritualizing and soothing the intertwining of living things and places.

A concern for ecology is present in the modesty of means. This inhabits the craft aesthetic, the spontaneous, found, hijacked forms, like so many appeals from elsewhere, appeals for other, less certain, less valid visions. Stranger, daring, honest, kitsch forms capture emotions to touch us. The works affirm that something else can be affirmed. And not without contradictions or ecstasy but with no compass, La main-pleur now gives itself up to this.

Artists:

Chiara Bertin is a multidisciplinary artist who shares her time between Fribourg and Italy. Her practice focuses on ideas in relation to the ephemeral, to transformation and to hybridization that she renders using light, slowness, chemistry and plants to propose a new take on stories and techniques from a feminist perspective.

Guillaume Dénervaud is a Swiss artist who has been living in Paris for several years. He develops drawings, paintings, sculptures and lights inspired by the world of anticipation. He raises contemporary questions in relation to ecological, political or technological currents that he renders using very refined techniques in the form of components intermingling cables, plants and immersed objects.

Julie Folly lives and works in Fribourg. Through her photographic work on the body and performance, as well as her involvement in the queer pornography production collective Oil Productions, she undertakes to shake up gender codes and break down the barriers of standardised conceptions of sexuality. Her fluid aesthetic and often collective approaches open up and go beyond the fields of contemporary art in a broader queer and feminist approach.

Margaux Huber lives and works in Bern. She has developed a unique installation practice drawing on conceptual gestures. Her works play with the constructed codes of Swiss identity and its domestic and rural collective imagination. Her second-degree, subtle references undermine the assurance and supposed gravity of contemporary art.

JEREMY is a Swiss painter based in Berlin. He has developed a practice combining biography and fantasy. References to landscape painting and symbolism inhabit exuberant narratives that participate in the revival of body representation painting. The artist is part of a movement that reaches out beyond the question of gender to inter-species considerations.

Jordan Selophane lives and works in Geneva. His expressive drawings and his salt dough sculptures characterise a polymorphic practice with real sensitivity. Through accumulation and saturation, the artist evokes the transformation of intimacy. His pop forms constitute a commentary on the consumerism of a generation who plays its identities in the mirroring produced by social networks.

Sacha Rappo is an artist living and working in Fribourg. Embracing a real economy of means and material insecurity, he highlights accidents specific to the conservation of works, isolating fragments and reversing phenomena of scale. Any travel he undertakes is sustainable, modest and yet meaningful, like the footnote to a scholarly publication.

Rebecca Solari is a transdisciplinary artist living and working in Amsterdam. Her practice combines performance, video, music and installation and revolves around self-representation, the desire to destroy pre-established codes and explore gender and social identities. She is part of the electro-punk duo Crème Solaire, the musical and performance project Fulmine and has performed on the French-speaking and German-speaking scene as well as in France, Belgium and Germany.

Remy Ugarte Vallejos is an artist living and working in Geneva. His work questions the relationship of bodies to technologies of control and the violence of their attributions. His approach to film and installation offers an anthropological reading of technique. Using sometimes archaic materials, he explores mediation and culture as a vehicle of the spiritual and creator of emotions.

René Walker is a painter living and working in Fribourg. Playing with the body and its representation, the artist intervenes physically on his canvases by means of cuts, insertions and textile additions of limbs that allow him to engage in the painting process in a performative way. The constraints involved in the production of his images set him to a pictorial fight with monstrous expressive forms constantly on the verge of transformation.