To the Paintings! Residence Exposition Ephémère, 9eme Concept

From a simple artistic project to the Résidence-Exposition Aux Paintings! Our initial project was to organize an artistic event in Marseille, large-scale and accessible to all. To realize this idea, we set out to find a place devoted to demolition or rehabilitation. Our approach evolved when we took the opportunity to carry out the project in the former school of Saint Thomas Aquinas. The discovery of the place was a nice surprise: a primary school, a kindergarten, a high school, and large courtyards, it was both disproportionate and completely unexpected. As soon as we first visited, we fell in love with the place … The school as an institution is a strong symbol of our society, with the simple artistic approach added: the school therefore, for decor and for subject.

At the initiative of the project we were three: Alexandre D’Alessio in charge of the artistic direction, Karine Terlizzi of production and Charlotte Pelouse of the management of the project.

We were very quickly joined by Élodie Gaillard for communication and Nicolas Brun for the management. If we thought of the well-defined posts, we quickly realized that in order to achieve our objective we would have to improvise painters, roofers, electricians, security agents, etc. We proposed 40 artists to accompany us in this adventure, their talents and their artistic universes were decisive. The exhibition had to sweep away a wide spectrum of current creation and mix different styles, techniques and influences. Wishing to give a great resonance to the event, we wanted to invite artists from the local, national and international scene. From February to May 2015, we welcomed them successively in residence at the school. We worked on the logistics and organization of the exhibition when they appropriated the place with brushes, bombs, chalk, collages, stencils, installations, sculptures, engravings, photographs.

The school has metamorphosed over the course of artistic interventions, without altering the primary vocation of the place. As a puzzle, each new work completed the previous ones. During these four months, like a large colocation, the school has become a place of excitement and play where the moments spent together have become key moments. HQ of collective life, the large playground heard numbers of anecdotes, ideas, exchanges and welcomed a lot of meals and other aperitifs. Team and artists all collaborated in sharing their vision of the school and their common challenge to meet.

The project :
Located in the heart of Marseille, between the prefecture and the Cours Julien, the old Saint Thomas d’Aquin school covers more than 4500 m2 and includes a whole school: kindergarten, primary, secondary and high school. Formerly a bastide “Flotte de la Buzine”, this remarkable 18th century building has been listed on the list of historic monuments since 2013. It was baptized Saint Thomas Aquinas in 1904 when it was converted into a school. It is in this school, closed since 2012, that the association Juxtapoz has chosen to coordinate an artistic residence. The exhibition, punctuated by various multidisciplinary events, was open to the public from June to October 2015.Alexandre d’Alessio, artistic director of the event, selected forty artists to design ephemeral works within the walls classroom, outdoor courses, playground, etc.). From the 9th concept, the latter imagined an original scenography through 2,500 m2 of exhibition. In response to a growing demand from artists and the public, it is a unique event offered in Marseille and intended for all, from 7 to 77 years. This exhibition is organized by the association JUXTAPOZ and supported by the collective 9th concept.

Artist: Pedro Richardo

“Sense of visit”

In a staircase dedicated to a sense of circulation, Pedro Richardo proposes two senses of reading to his work. The first is that of a sensitive being that grows like a plant towards an inescapable end, punctuated by encounters with others, and a second that starts from fear to go to life. His work based on a stroke creates forms in tension and contrasts colors in softness, giving rise to a new subject on all floors, according to the visitor’s point of view.

“Destandardized classroom”

Students in this elementary class no longer want to be considered sheep by a school system unable to take into account the plurality of their psychologies and modes of learning. They decided to retake power there and have consequently initiated a general destandardization of this rigid institution which has no other ambition than to train them according to the criteria of a sick society. This room is in their image, elementary, colorful, plural and playful.

“Conceived”

My elementary school, that of my childhood, was called Jules Verne, a sign of modern times that foreshadowed my vocation as an artist. The work presented in this classroom is an indirect tribute to Jules Verne and to the fantastic and humanist evocation of this creator of genius as well as to John Lennon, with an injunction rather than an invitation inscribed on the picture “imagine … “It is a vision of our world on the naive scale of the child that I stayed, a narrative to combine where a tentacular city arises from the belly of sardines (we are in Marseille), where fantastic creatures , such as this gentleman Chewinggum, pace the city with a soft smile, oil flows afloat, fighter planes or drones criss-cross the sky, and the vegetation rebels …
All these combinations tell our world from the inside and place us on the scale of childhood as a witness, actor, and narrator of our time.

“The Blue Room”

Blue the sky through the windows of the class,

For many synonymous with cage,

This student is waiting for time to pass,

His thoughts, dreams and desires, moreover,

Dreamer of encounters, experiences, travel,

One day understood that the school made him better.

“Three Steps Revolution”

Mattia works abstraction of form, bringing together geometry and a beautiful harmony of bright colors. His work in sculpture echoes his painting.

“Leave the kids alone”

The idea was to use the walls (and in particular the texture of the wallpaper) as a sort of giant drawing sheet.
I worked on the wall support in the same way that I would have worked and painted on paper. The whole thing is done in a very spontaneous way to see “freestyle” even if one can recognize one of my recurring characters from my universe. Create shapes, redefine them and reinterpret them graphically to create heterogeneous characters with multiple eyes and sharp teeth.
Since the space was quite small (a small cubic-sized room), it was necessary to keep clear and virgin areas in order to allow the composition to be “breathed”, in spite of a part whose background is totally painted black in order to create a sort of painting gigantic on which one would think that a student would have addressed directly to his teachers through the words of a song of Pink Floyd “Another brick in the wall”: “Hey teachers! Leave the kids alone!” (roughly: “hey the teachers, fool the kids”) to remind us that it is important or even important to let the imagination of the children develop and to let them express themselves without any established rule and that finally no wall can not hinder this.

“Somnium”

By entering this classroom, we find ourselves immersed in a dreamlike universe; the capture of a fixed moment, made dynamic by the line and the motives of books. The mobile recalls the childhood and the always somewhat floating side of dreams. The visual effect of these lines in size XXL that leave and draw a vertiginous journey and these pages of books inlaid which are so many proofs of the reality of this experience. The artist reinterprets the place in the manner of a Mondrian or a Dubuffet, thus satisfying a child’s dream of covering everything with drawings and coloring. The universe he creates remains in total adequacy with the place because it is populated with materials and objects found inside the school itself.
Childhood is conducive to reverie and wanderings of all kinds. Here the artist projects himself into his own childlike reminiscences in which he remembers his representation of learning and the abstract character of knowledge.
The transmission of knowledge is not in vain and requires constant attention.

The transmission of knowledge is not in vain and requires constant attention.

Stéphane Carricondo invites us in this former classroom to reflect on the school marked by magic, sacrifice and contemplation. He proposes to confront tribal energies and sense of order. In the center, like a large planisphere, is painted a blue circle surrounded by school chairs, in a corner a large triangle in depth. Through the windows, portraits in vitrophy represent children from around the world who seem to witness a strange ritual with occult paces. On the walls are imposed large shapes, unusual silhouettes of bodies of characters or shadow-colored animals that project their ritual dances. Its surfaces are taken up with the drawing, with the aerosol can and appear small jewels that look like reduced heads bursting like flames.
This invitation to a great sacrifice to the shamanic looks seems to question us on a modern reading of the caves of Lascaux and the myth of the cave.

“Shape wave”

All forms emit waves. The action and power of these waves depends on the form itself. A wave of form is the propagation of a perturbation producing in its passage a reversible variation of the local physical properties of the medium. Inspired by the universe of decor, I wanted to construct a scenography that captures the whole room, to create an immersive space that illustrates this phenomenon. Bringing out crystals that pierce the ceiling, is an attempt to show the strength of the organic architecture, its complexity and finesse, the shape wave of crystals.

“The school … geography, biology, mathematics … a little … but not only!”

Pablito Zago dwells on all the sides that build a child during his schooling: all these long moments of boredom, the strolls in the corridors, the first loves, the first fantasies, the first penalties, imaginary … Through a corridor of three floors, between comics and notebooks, Zago attempts to highlight these informal moments, outside teaching, where through the school the child develops his imagination, his reverie . The school becomes for him, the place where the pencil and the pen take a preponderant place in his life and his work …

“Listen & Repeat”

The abstract work of this English artist is broken down into two parts entitled “Listen & repeat”, in reference to his French courses. His “abstract graffiti”, a term that seems too much overused to describe his work, is a perpetual search for the interaction between color and form. Remi Rough is one of the first artists to have brought abstraction into the world of graffiti.

“Oneiros”

During the course of my schooling, during the class councils or other meetings of parents, a sentence came regularly: “Your son is a good student, but he’s a dreamer, he’s often in the moon.” It was not wrong!
Twenty years later, it has not really changed. Besides, it’s not that bad. The project Aux tablesaux! gives me the opportunity to show you the many dream journeys I have been through during this period.

“On the way to the siesta”

In this exhibition, I took care of the staircase connecting the classes of the nursery school. It serves two very playful rooms realized by Goddog and Olivia de Bona, so it was very important for me to make a very colorful and fairy-like painting. I wanted to bring the spectators to the installation of Olivia de Bona by a path somewhat supernatural, where the animals of the forest are represented, so that their imagination gradually begins to settle and prepares them gradually to the nap, and to the world of dreams.

“The nap time”

It is the nap time in Mademoiselle Juliette’s kindergarten class. She tells the story they invented: “it is the story of little men visiting an abandoned school …” And if we were the visitors who had come straight out of their imagination?

“Old School”

“Old school”: expression used especially in the hiphop medium in reference to the early 1980s, birth period of the graffiti movement.
Revenge taken on this terrifying blackboard of our school years.

“School”

The beast represents the school. It penetrates from the rear. Inside you learn more or less things in different materials.
And we come out by the slide that projects us into the active life.

“Evasion”

Working in a playground is not an obvious exercise, it is even a misunderstanding. So I decided to divert strict elements of school architecture (doors, tables, storage …) to make it a playground. The playground is, in my opinion, one of the first spaces of creation.
The children learn to express themselves, to communicate, to position themselves in relation to each other, in relation to society and the law represented by the school authority. But it is above all there that they learn to escape! After having stored a lot of information in the classroom, in which they tend to turn them into good citizens by instilling in them the codes necessary for their good evolution in the adult world, they go out into the yard and continue to be children! They invent and tell stories, play roles, look at the sky and go into exile from this school that wants to make them good adults sooner or later.
I have represented this escape by a chimpanzee who is floating in a parallel universe (the projection of a child who identifies himself with a fictitious character). It diverts school and social codes (represented by the installation of straight lines and angles) that try to enclose it in order to make it a dream world and its own world. I invite all spectators, young and old alike, to put themselves in the place of the central character and to tell one another

“The Platane”

The plane tree is the recurrent element of our school yards. The universal tree of the competitions of marbles or the starting point of reference of 1,2,3 sun. Here he partially masked the wall we were to paint. As the constraint comes from creation, we have imagined putting the tree at the center of this creation. The wall is its background, a game of anamorphosis was created between the two elements so that the two planes interact. The centers of the painted circles are assembled with the knots of the branches of the tree which symbolize the vital energy of the tree, the growth of the being, the changes in direction of the antler or life. The lower triangle has a special place in the superposition of the two planes, emphasizing the first choice of existence, the one where the roads separate.
In the opposite direction, the shadows cast from the branches on the wall interested us, a material and graphic background was sufficient to dress this space that the shadows come to inhabit naturally and to put in movement. The geometry of the façade is also disturbed by this triangle at the bottom that breaks the flat side of the wall and opens a new perspective, one can perhaps see in it the form of an open book. It is the tree of knowledge where ideas and knowledge cross. Or, perhaps, you can see an arrow pointing toward the tree tops, like a heading to reach, far beyond the wall … And all this painted with tools for big children!

“Dilemma”

Between light and darkness, between bright colors and shades of gray, this work is the representation of the contrast between good and evil, the image of our first steps in the playground, our first choices, good or bad. In the form of a chimera with two faces exiting from the wall, as if to confront you with the dilemma, this work is the fruit of the close collaboration between two Marseilles artists NeurÖne and Hasart.

“Cargo, the beautiful escape”

A sweet dream, transporting Marseille and its urban chaos across the seas. For many Marseilles we can not leave this city except to take it with us. Marseille land of welcome, here it is she who leaves. The creations of Joan Ceccaldi from photographic images worked, destructured and reconstructed are articulated around the theme of Marseille that he wants to leave the usual clichés. The city is reviewed through its various aspects highlighting known buildings, ancient monuments and current town planning. The ambient disorder attached to the image of Marseilles and Marseilles is evoked by the apparent chaos of the images of which, on the contrary, the analysis shows a composition with rigorous architecture.

A universe shared between three artists and tattooists from the Black Blue tattoo shop: Franck Pellegrino, Veenom and Mast Cora. In a typical aesthetic of the Gothic tattoo, Veenom imposes his style with the design of a laughing skull. Franck Pellegrino focuses his work on typography by taking here an emblematic archive of the Fleet of Buzine (former name of the main building). Mast’s painting reflects a scene of youth life in an abstract and illustrated way.

“We still remember some tricks”

A classroom has as its object, a fortiori, the course of a course, by a professor, who is supposed to teach a subject in accordance with national education programs, to pupils whose prerogatives are limited to the file of a chair and at the last corner of an office.
The great white form at the entrance, the clinical rigor of which echoes the scales and coefficients allowing to situate algebraically the humans of the same age class, speaks of this. Once this subject was evacuated, it was boring in addition, is that you remember the rest? These moments of boredom to dream like a berlaud (cf: jug, nigaud … It’s a class too, so if you can learn something …), fantasize about Magalie or the Spanish teacher (nb : you can replace the first names or the subjects, it’s super free there), to scribble on his double copy … In short, to be everywhere except in this class? So, eh … Between the history teacher (always changeable …) and the dates of the Regency (17151723), Seriously … The rest of the play talks about that.

After the barbarism of the second war and before the crises and convulsions of the end of the century, the 60s and 70s gave the young students, through speech boards destined to develop oral language, characteristic archetypal scenes of the mentalities of the time. Which ones? An eternal smile hanging on the corner of her lips, a smooth, permanent blonde, the woman disappears behind the Mother, the One, queen ant of the hearth, tender, without relief and without state of soul, devoted body and soul to her role to serve the powerful Man and his desires. Confined “inside”, it has the duty to bring up children in a well-meaning, conformist and smooth morality. Man, the “father”, the “head of the family”, assigned to the much more noble tasks necessary for his relaxation and his dominant male balance bringing home the fruit of his daily labor, drives a beautiful car, he likes to hunt with good comrades … He is serious, responsible, and a careerist, for it is on his solid shoulders that the future of the holy family rests. If he is “out”, it is not to entertain himself at the zoo with his children but to build a project and make the nation grow; it is the Authority which naturally confers upon its genitories as the uniform of the gendarme gives to the person who carries it the duty of symbolic incarnation of the incontestable law; the school is the place of learning these roles to be built to better … Reproduce them and serve for the grand design of a powerful nation. So ? Of course these images smell of naphthalene and dusty myth. They give laughter to the frozen representations of the past. Do they not give thought when the artist insidiously and voluntarily introduces a grain of sand into this oiled mechanism? Almost 40 years later, these diversions of the message through images allow us to become aware of the sometimes disastrous consequences of presenting a world artificially radiating and unwound from drives that, ignored or repressed, inevitably end up exploding on the theater of everyday life, ie OUR life. From the devouring mother to the totalitarian threat, from the “Monster Man” to the dwarf dwarfs … Jace puts the truth of the fleshly being at the heart of the idyllic scenes. To laugh tenderly or to grind teeth …. Just a slip to help us understand that the denial that is taught is obviously political but also that it engenders at best disenchantment and at worst an immense chaos individual or collective. JACE or the art of dynamiting a building without making noise … YES, definitely, we are not at Disneyland.

“2H (more) to kill”

His religion? The rock’n’roll. Its main defect? His rebellious youth … This will earn him 2 hours more than the others at the end of the day. 2 hours to kill. In short, one is not serious when one is seventeen years … From the office of the teacher seize the extent of his solitary escape … From the altar of “Rock to 2 strokes” to “scratched stained glass” , through a blackness to the oil of draining to cut with the knife, the movement of the youth spreads there ….
But rest assured “as long as there is black there is hope”!

“Box City”

His current project “Box City” is an installation that he makes on the street with an audience, usually in communities excluded from society (in shanty towns, political refugee communities and also within artists’ communities). Here he gives us an example of a facility in which children participated.
On the wall, it is a self-portrait composed of elements recalling its scientific research on ovarian cancer.

“Disciplinary Board”

“Pupil in difficulty, unruly, inattentive, distracted, disruptive, not concentrated, can do better, can not fall lower, redoublement envisaged … Convocation of the parents by the main teacher”.
Such were the appreciations I could receive. The school is a struggle for many students.
Unsuitable! It is not the pupils, but the educational system. Where is the place of the individual, of originality, of creation, difference? Conformist, conditioned, intransigent, authoritarian, repressive …
Not to mention the alternatives proposed by educational advisors. Always higher, higher, rise, integrate.
The school wants us to standards, calibrated as a product to be placed on the labor market. A perfect product, with the right color, the right size, that shines. I am a wild fruit, a thistle, inconsolable, raw, authentic, which follows my desires. I was the last, below, but the ground is not so far and the essential is not to keep your feet on earth and head in the clouds to live before dying? My values ​​and my education, it was my parents who gave them to me … Not school.
The rigor I found in my passion … Not in school. Quality is the 9th Concept that taught me … Not the school.
The child is purity, originality, power, creativity, fulfillment, support and listening.
We have never finished learning. We are in perpetual evolution. Nothing is ever acquired. Life is the only school and there is no degree.
To my parents, thank you for everything.

In my play there is, on one side, the spiritual world. A sort of holy trinity represented by three triangles which contain the three most famous architectural plans of churches in France (a Cistercian church on the left, a Romanesque church in the center, and a Gothic church on the right). The plans contain a thinking mind (a head if one can say).
These heads are embodied by embossed triangles filled with motifs intertwined like brains. They radiate vibratory waves, like energy prisms. These “spirits” are not at the same height and thus reconstitute the sign of the cross (the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit). The Holy Spirit is the greatest but also the most responsible, that is why he weeps tears of blood. Compared to the Saint Thomas D’Aquin school, I refer to the religious teaching that was practiced in this place.
On the other side, the Cartesian world. A giant polygonal monolith. Emissary of the mathematical world, geometry and sciences. It is inlaid with tribal forms mixed with patterns of medieval motifs, arabesques or other interlacing. These vegetal-ethnic friezes draw their energy from the soil, such as roots, and restore it through the points of the polygon and the diamonds painted on the walls around it. This is another form of education practiced at school. The spectator who enters the center of the room is thus in the middle of these two forms of thought facing each other, but which are complementary. A triangle on the ground joins them to dialogue frontally. Otherwise the contact can be made by the “red wire” stretched on the sides to join the two entities. On the transverse walls one can see drawings of perspective treatises. They also make the link because there are always invisible bridges between mathematics, regulating plots, and sacred geometry. Quantum physics can thus reach philosophical and religious precepts.
It is finally a certain reflection on the world of teaching and what can be done thereafter in his life. A perception of the formations received by our ancestors, but also by the things that we do not control. The whole governed by the universal laws of the cosmos that the human being tries in vain to understand and master, without finding answers.

“The last meal”

This work “speaks”, in this symbolic place that is “the school Saint Thomas d’Aquin”, of the relation of the Master to the disciple.
The tutelary figure of Christ here is effaced, absorbed and radiating and gives us the image of our true nature: shapeless, timeless, without direction or meaning, without projection or fixation. She’s Nothing. This Nothing that appears when the “I Am” is born. The faces that surround this christian figure (which is reminiscent of the impossibilities of Mahomet’s invisible face), include our multiple mental postures, the “I Am This, I Am That”, which fix our place in the world. The Master returns us this projection.
In this installation we are facing our projections, in a closed world, black and white, at the limits of anguish. If it was not this orange sea under our feet …

“Walk the line”

Through a narrative journey, Alexandre D’Alessio decomposes the main elements that make up his painting.
Out of the void, its line crosses and carries with it the elements necessary to its creation, presented in the form of three cabinets of curiosities, History of art, color and work of the line.
Thus “charged,” she eventually gives life to her painting, deliberately imprinted with unfinished, as if one had suspended time, frozen the impulse of creation, to study its essence. The science offices remind us that the artist’s process of creation is a series of experiments and researches, and place the artist as an eternal pupil, who must never consider his or her training completed to push the boundaries of his art .

“What everyone calls” education “is a machine to make soldiers of the economy and not future human beings accomplished, capable of thinking, criticizing, creating, mastering and managing their emotions. .) ”

A small Japanese child is still happy to go to school.
Las pinturitas is happy to paint every day in front of her retirement home, she never went to school.
Movements to the outside.
Evasion. Dream. Freedom.
Meet with former students who have made a transition to school. Embalmed by life.

In this class, we try to immerse you in a little dream world, which could be inside the head of a schoolboy. A schoolboy a little different, who does not lack of black humor and irony. Influenced by designers like Crumb or Jim Philips, by the drawings of Mathis like the tattoo, one does not try to provoke, all that it is our universe. One wants to mix and visually connect the different facets of our personality, from the most poetic to the most out of tune, mixing tenderness and rage in a flood of colors and shapes.
Patterns or characters are used as patterns; at each new painting one writes a piece of their story, like a giant cartoon where each wall would be a hut.

“Ghosts”

The only sound of the wind in the trees of the courtyard, a ray of dusty sunlight through a broken pane. Deserted corridors, time, suspended. Armies of paper planes, the sound of chalk on the blackboard, the desire to escape between two lines of dictation, marbles rolling in pockets, letters lying in the thousands and dreams of children buried in the bottom of the lockers. So many chimeras imprisoned between four walls and silence, imprinted with our memories of schoolboys. The school is closed.

“Crystallize”

The installation in situ consists of a multitude of “pouet pouet,” cocottes “or” pioupiou “, folding, child’s play deploying on the ground. Each element plays with the lines and the reasons of the old tiling as well as” with the ogival crossings of the ceiling, and the geometrical shape that evokes also evokes the rosette and the sacred architecture, echoing the religious character of the places.

Many of you have supported us and all contributed to the success of the Aux Paintings event! This artistic experience, both professional and human, would not have had the same charm without you. A big thank-you.

A special thank you to the 9th Concept, thanks to whom the adventure has come true. Thank you to all our other partners and collaborators for your confidence, your commitment to our side and your support for cultural creation: DESPERADOS, Beaux-Arts Magazine, Boesner, the Congregation of Dominicans of the Holy Name of Jesus, the city of Marseille, Radio Nova, the PACA region, Tollens, Ventilo, the City of Marseille, the RACAC PACA, Dreadlocks.13, Graffiti Art Magazine, IOT records, Liquitex, Nacarat.