Car Wash, portrait of John M Armleder
Giulia, portrait of Giulia Essyad
Denis Savary presents two portraits of artists with whom he has been in dialogue for several years: John M Armleder and Giulia Essyad. Two video portraits and two original proposals that echo the programming of the Centre d'édition contemporaine, with John M Armleder having been invited to produce several editions, in 1992 and 2024, as was Giulia Essyad, in 2022 and 2024.
These two portraits depart from the classic approach to the genre, which would document and analyze the artist's work or personality. Savary's focus is instead on recurring and distinctive elements of the artistic practice of these two artists, who at first glance appear to be completely opposed: plants for Armleder, his body for Essyad.
Savary envisions these two productions as a sequel to Blood on the Dining-Room floor, the video he presented during his Quiet Clubbing exhibition at the Centre d’édition contemporaine in 2024. Indeed, we find in the portraits of Armleder and Essyad the notion of confinement in transparent spaces that characterized this video, a form of return to his past with a light show, in the style of a “country discotheque,” projected onto the walls of his childhood villa, transformed into a screen. For John M Armleder, he installs a plant garden in the passenger compartment of a car that he puts through a carwash. The transparency and brilliance of the windows are accentuated by jets of light, the water and the foam that trickle down, giving the illusion of artificial aquatic plants, all in perfect symbiosis with the soundtrack composed of Hawaiian music chosen by John M and Stéphane Armleder. In Giulia Essyad's portrait, the artist's face appears in the darkness of a laser game. The jets of light transform her into an unreal being, lit by an intense blue reminiscent of the Bluebots, her doubles, small figurines that populate her videos.
Like Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, these two new projects question the medium and the device of video. Car Wash becomes a kind of psychedelic aquarium where the image of the washing water is projected onto perfectly dry plants, evoking splashes, a recurring motif in Armleder's work. The video Giulia is also structured around such a light projection effect. The laser tag sometimes blends into Essyad's face and sometimes reflects it. The artist, like a ghost trapped in a television screen, transparently reveals the space she seems to haunt.
June 4, 2025
