News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café
News from Veracruz - Le Grand Café

Exhibition

Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize cultivate an engaged, resolutely hybrid, and expanded practice that mixes art and craft. Their works are true visual inquiries, developed by assemblage and revealing a compilation of references that simultaneously draw on the everyday, popular culture, and art history. For them, drawing is omnipresent. It allows for thought to exist, in the form of sketches and notes. It spreads across the walls and other supports—ceramics or wallpapers—with a gentle and abundant eccentricity.
At Le Grand Café, with the end of the 19th century as a backdrop, they weave together several stories and mix the utopian visions of William Morris, fervent militant of English socialism and founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, with those of Elisée Reclus, libertarian geographer and participant in the Commune. Although the two men corresponded, they were never able to meet and combine their utopian visions: this exhibition grants that wish.

News from Veracruz—it could be the title of an adventure story—Veracruz, or the damp exoticism of a colonial city that became a port for the Mexican navy… By placing the imaginary décor of their exhibition in that town, Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize incorporate a biographical dimension, seen through the prism of a more global history: the artists have in fact recently produced ceramics in Mexico, displayed on the first floor of Le Grand Café. The pieces were brought back to Europe by boat from Veracruz, a port which was once connected to Saint-Nazaire by a transatlantic link. By a strange coincidence a group of Communards attempted, without success, to implant a community over there and it is precisely this period at the end of the 19th century that inspired the artists for their project for Saint-Nazaire. Thanks to the hazards of history and unexpected geographical connections, Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize create an elaborate visual story that takes in several spaces and times and where one thing unlocks another.

Under the cover of innocent forms—bunches of flowers, bucolic scenes or decorative motifs, Lamarche-Ovize explore the power of a coded visual language that is much more engaged than it first seems. Out of this voyage through decorative motifs and this falsely naïve world comes an acerbic reflection on revolutionary thought and the forms that embody it: a subversive chronicle, directly engaged with today’s world, of the value of labour, geopolitics, and the fundamental ties between ecology and philosophy.

Éva Prouteau

Artworks

Ground Floor / Large Room

Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
To Sarah (William and Rihanna)
2015
Mixed media on paper
120 x 180 cm
Courtesy Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois Gallery
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
William, des motifs
2017
6-pass screen printing
20 editions
110 x 160 cm
Production Workshop Arcay
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Le Bouquet d'Anna
2016
Gouache on paper
40 x 50 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Rentilly (Macule)
2017
Wall screen printing
320 x 220 cm
Production Workshop Arcay
First Floor

Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
El Murro
2015
Glazed earthenware
115 x 63 x 35 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
La Bruschetta del domingo
2015
Glazed earthenware
60 x 50 x 140 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Pop Column (Manzana)
2015
Glazed earthenware
30 x 50 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Zapato
Glazed earthenware
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Cabeza de huevo
2015
Glazed earthenware
40 x 40 x 70 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Manzana
Glazed earthenware
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Pop Column (Perro)
2015
Glazed earthenware
130 x 30 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
El Alcachofa
2015
Glazed earthenware
80 x 80 x 50 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Sueno de huevo
2015
Glazed earthenware
120 x 30 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Bruschetta, perros sobre cajas
2015
Glazed earthenware
80 x 40 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Manzana y hielo
2015
Glazed earthenware
130 x 60 x 60 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Los Perros
2015
Glazed earthenware
82 x 40 x 40 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Pop Column (Pequena)
2015
Glazed earthenware
30 x 50 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Zapato y manzana
2015
Glazed earthenware
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Nopale y zapato
2015
Glazed earthenware
60 x 60 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Pop Column (Enano)
2015
Glazed earthenware
120 x 30 x 30 cm
Florentine & Alexandre Lamarche-Ovize
Las Flores y el pero
2015
Glazed earthenware

Biography

Born respectively in 1980 and 1978.
Live and work in Aubervilliers. Since 2006, they have signed a joint production.
Represented by the Luis Adelantado Gallery in Valence (Spain).

website
gallery website