After Abidjan in 2019, Véronique Rieffel opened her Parisian gallery at 110, rue Saint-Honoré, in the 1st arrondissement. An address that is intended as an exhibition space, but also a living space with a restaurant – La Table du 110 – and a cellar for concerts and literary encounters.
“In recent years, Paris has reasserted itself as an essential artistic scene, open to artists from all over the world, reviving the historical role it played in the 20th century. With the opening of leading private foundations, international artist residencies, the consolidation of fairs like AKAA and the arrival of Paris by Art Basel, this ecosystem offers more than ever stimulating and exciting perspectives for a young gallerist.” , underlines Véronique Rieffel.
In addition to the commercial activity itself, the idea is to create an artistic but also festive HQ, a laboratory in order to give visibility to essentially non-Western creators. Contacts that the gallery owner was able to establish while working at the cultural affairs department of the city of Paris, at the Institute of Islamic Cultures, at the Philharmonie, at the Jeu de Paume, at the Lambert Collection in Avignon, but also in Egypt, Ivory Coast or the United Arab Emirates.
An opening to the Global South
Véronique Rieffel wishes to defend and accompany African visual artists, but does not refrain from “working with artists from other geographies, bearers of other stories”. What counts for her, “is this multiplicity of stories, images, and to open contemporary art to a universality of which Europe is no longer the center”. A real opening to the Global South.
She wants to follow in the footsteps of Jean-Hubert Martin, curator of the exhibition “Les Magiciens de la Terre” at the Georges-Pompidou center and at La Grande Halle de la Villette in 1989, which presented for the first time in France non-Western contemporary works of art, in order to show the universality of the act of creation and to promote a dialogue between cultures. The Parisian museum even organized, twenty-five years after the initial exhibition, an international symposium, a documentary exhibition and a summer university, underlining the major importance of the 1989 event.
For the inauguration of the gallery, Véronique Rieffel chose the Togolese artist Clay Apenouvon: “I believe without a shadow of a doubt in his creative power, the current strength of his work and his posterity. He is a perfectly honest and demanding artist in his proposal. It doesn’t just copy or please potential buyers. He searches, he explores and always surprises us. His work is both deeply coherent and always renewed. Entitled “Total Black”, the exhibition aims in particular to suggest “black gold in a visible and direct expression”, says the visual artist.
Born in Lomé in 1970, Clay Apenouvon quickly got into trouble with the school institution. After turning his back on school, he became an apprentice in a screen printing workshop, Art Modesty, and discovered his interest in drawing, painting, typography… In 1992, he left Togo for France. In Paris, the visual artist met many artists, including Claude Viallat, a figure in the Supports/Surfaces movement, known for creating works by playing on abstraction, geometry and colors. He is also interested in the current of New Realism, whose creations are characterized by an appropriation of reality, opposing abstract painting.
Plastic black film and survival blanket
These two movements will feed Clay Apenouvon’s reflection and have a fundamental influence on his work: “My artistic position is not aligned on a single path, but embraces a whole universe in which abstraction and figuration need the one from the other. One of the artists I greatly admire is the German painter Gerhard Richter. We can observe with what simplicity his work navigates marvelously between the abstract and the figurative. »
The works presented for the inaugural exhibition underline this dual approach. Paintings composed using two surprising materials: black plastic film and survival blanket. “What is extremely interesting is to see the infinite potentialities and resources of these materials, revealed by the way Clay explores them. It is fascinating to see how fruitful this self-imposed constraint is and frees him from the traditional codes of painting,” says Véronique Rieffel.
For the artist, the use of black plastic film is intended to underline the importance of this material in international trade and the present and future consequences that our lifestyles have on the environment. Virtually all export goods are packaged and protected by this invasive support throughout the world, a symbol for the visual artist of the ongoing ecological disaster. Clay Apenouvon works this film to bring it to life: stretched, crumpled, heated, matte or glossy, “it doesn’t tell the same story. These are the memories of matter. Like an attempt to reunite black people with all the different expressions that this plastic offers me to see”.
The survival blanket also occupies a primordial place in the work of the artist. This “distress gold,” as he calls it, refers to migrants rescued from perilous crossings of the Sahara or the Mediterranean, often stranded and forgotten in makeshift shelters in Europe. Associated with black, gold and silver streak, scar or mesh the works, as in Survival Square, forming quasi-geometric or seemingly unstructured sets. “I moved these materials into a field of creation, in a battle for visibility”, explains the visual artist.
Finally, the portraits of his mother, his father or Mohamed Ali – the artist’s name is Clay, in reference to the first surname of the legendary boxer – represent, according to the native of Lomé, “fragments, fragments of political stories and arts of Africa to the world”. Dark silhouettes on a gold background, where the characters seem to emerge from the paintings, like an affirmation of a certain light.