The City Hall as an Artroom

In September 2021, Zurzach City Hall opened its doors to contemporary art and invited painter and sculptor Juliet Vles to exhibit ten of her large-format wall sculptures there. Presenting high-profile artwork in public spaces is always challenging. It introduces an new and unfamiliar atmosphere in an everyday working place and can easily be perceived as hermetic and elitist. However, the artist likes exposing outside the mainstream circuit, and the bright, spacious interior design of the City Hall surrounding the central marble staircase provides a museum-like setting for her abstract, geometrically constructed works. 

Juliet Vles is a European artist, born in Rotterdam in 1950 and raised in Switzerland. Although primarily known as an abstract painter and sculptor, whose wall sculptures are mainly found in arte povera and minimal art collections, Vles also uses other plastic forms of expression such as collage, digital art, and installation for her artistic work. Her works have been shown in countless exhibitions at home and abroad; in 2016, she represented Switzerland at Consul Art at the Musée de l'Artisanat et des Métiers d'Art (MAMA) in Marseille.

At Flecken, Vles presents four pictures from the “Krypta” series: three-dimensional wooden constructions covered with subtle paintings, writing, and collages, which form a painterly counterbalance to the often architectural forms of the support. The exhibition is rounded off by six wall sculptures from the glassworks cycle, in which glass and plexiglas are also used as working materials.

The exhibition will be shown in the City Hall from September 2021 and during the whole year of 2022.

Consul'Art 

Consul'Art is a major international art exhibition representing all countries that have an embassy in Marseille. The artists are selected by their respective consulates to represent their countries at the exhibition. With 69 consulates on its territory, Marseille ranks second only to Paris in terms of French diplomacy. The scope and appeal of the exhibition is correspondingly large. Ninety works are presented to the public: paintings, sculptures, photographs, but also weavings, ceramics, lighting fixtures, and inlays. Each artist interprets the culture of their home country according to their own ideas. While some works draw on traditional models, others tend toward a more visionary or symbolic interpretation. 

For the fourth consecutive year, the exhibition is being held in the historic halls of the Musée d'Art et d'Artisanat (MAMA), whose large rooms offer space for a wide range of contemporary art in a variety of styles and media. Careful curation and documentation complement the tactile experience of the artworks and allow viewers to engage with the culture of each country beyond the duration of the exhibition.

LÂMINA

Juliet Vles' recent paintings, abstractions that border on the figurative, borrow meaning and essence from the forms of nature – what the artist calls «organic abstraction». In this context, the works in the Witwater series occupy an important place. Fascinated by hydraulic studies, technical sketches a priori without artistic ambition, Vles takes up their structure and the treatment of water «slowed down» into a solid substance, whose frozen movement ressembles braided hair or the drapery of a transparent fabric.

From this formal appropriation, Vles follows its different material and spiritual visions of water. Its power in the «Waves», braids of water climbing in a compact spiral to the upper margin of the painting, to open in a singular wave and fall back with force the length of the canvas. Its geometry in «Concentric Circles», its fluidity in «Streamlines», linear curtains of water covering the canvas and its initial design, evoking the mirage of a hidden landscape. Its grace in «Wings», aquatic and aerial at once. Its archaic turbulence in the «Nativity» cycle, whose rhythm and baroque design mark the element's archetypal character.

Water, even in its abstraction, remains an indigenous energy, a primary           force that excludes human presence.The anthropocentric ideal is definitively rejected. Any psychological or sociological interpretation, reducing nature to a function of the human mind, would be out of place in the face of such an elementary work. A work as transparent as water; no mystery other than that of simple natural form, no objective other than that of simple artistic documentation. No pretension other than that of painting, no research other than that of the image. Plastic art in its most modest, and most difficult, form.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Leon Taveling, 2004                                                                        

KATHAROI

One of the most iconic castles in the heart of the Gascogne, the Château de Lavardens, was built in the 12^th century as the stronghold of the Counts of Armagnac. Restored in the 17^th century, it was classified as a Historic Monument and is today an art center, hosting major cultural events.

The exhibition «Katharoi» by Juliet Vles, shown this summer in all the rooms and caves of the castle, is exceptional in that it is conceived by the artist in collaboration with Amnesty International. Its theme is the genocide of the Cathares, a religious sect living in the South of France, by the French king and his catholic counsellors in the 14th century. While this gruesome event plays an important part in the local chronicles of the Gascogne, the suppression and eradication of religious minorities is at the same time an universal theme in human history, and one that particularily occupies the international sections of Amnesty.

The artistic trail leads through the many rooms of the castle, starting in the great central hall with large, abstract paintings, symbolizing the spiritual beauty of faith. This spirit is retained in the following rooms, but the atmosphere gets slowly more threatening as the cruelty and intolerance of religious fanatisme starts showing through. Descending to the caves, the visitor is then confronted with the full horrors of religious extremism, scenes of death and torture alternating with black satire. This thought-provoking journey through the beauty and corruption of religious faith, although it has already provoked some controversy before the exhibition even started, is a challenging experience for every artlover who expects an exhibition to be more than simply nice and entertaining.

Bât'Image

The arcos project (art contemporain sud-ouest) is an informal collective of artists, collectors, and art lovers, living inthe South-West of France, that arose from a shared desire to promote the visual arts in the region and make them more accessible to audiences outside urban centers.

With the exhibition «Bât'Image», held in a former farmhouse called “Le Bâtiment” in the middle of the Gers countryside, the group presents around fifteen international artists who live and work locally. While maintaining a strict artistic quality in the selection of the works presented, the exhibition sees itself as «regional» in that it rejects sterile elitism and sees itself as complementary to, rather than in contradiction with, its rural environment.                                      The generous support of the villagers and the town hall of St. Paul de Baïse, as well as the intervention of Bertrand Bortoloni, who creates land art-style signs with his tractor, build a bridge between culture and agriculture.

                                                                            SKY TRAP                                                                                     (l'Improvisation de Saint Jean)

The installation «l’Improvisation de Saint Jean» was conceived for the exhibition Bât’Image at St.Paul de Baïse and really was an improvisation, as the artist initially designated to the place was obliged to give forfeit one day before the vernissage, on the 24^th of june 2000, date dedicated to St.John.

The sculpture consists of a 5 metres high structure of oak beams from which a very large glass panel is suspended, that captures and mirrors the surrounding environment – at once artwork and chronicler of the passing time.The huge glass panel reflects the hours of the day: the dew at dawn melting at the first sun rays giving place to matitunal projections of the environing buildings and vegetation. Following the progress of the sun, it captures the incandescent light at noon and the soft and filigrane design of the evening light.

The glass becomes receptacle of the surrounding world, transforming it according to physical law and returning images varying from photographical reproduction to pure abstraction.

(Judith Hoffmann «Travaux sur Transparence»)