Author: admin

From 29 May to 25 July 2020
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Havana, he had a solo exhibition every year from 1954 to 1958 at the annual salon of the Museum of Modern Art in the Cuban capital. In 1960 the Ministry of Education awarded him a grant to study art in Paris. The journey proved decisive, for the artist decided to settle there and still lives there. In 1968 his first Paris exhibition, with a preface by Max Ernst, was held at the Galerie Le Point Cardinal, which from then on showed his work regularly.

“[…] As for the young, I pity them. How can they not feel that everything has been done before them? It is wrong to make gods of them before they have even had time to express themselves. One of them, Ferrer, is something of a discovery of mine. Far from Pop Art, Mec’Art and their substitutes, he seems to me profoundly authentic […]”

Max Ernst

He has been exhibited in France at the Fondation Maeght and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and elsewhere in Europe (Belgium, Switzerland…). Alongside his work as a painter, Joaquín Ferrer also developed a substantial body of work as a printmaker, illustrating many books by poets and writers. Joaquín Ferrer’s style tends towards lyrical abstraction, with figures built like puzzles that are not unreminiscent of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
Biography
Birth (1928)

Joaquín Ferrer Marquines was born on 4 October 1928 in Manzanillo, a small fishing port on the eastern tip of Cuba. Owing to an administrative error, his date of birth is sometimes given as 4 July 1929. His father, Joaquín Ferrer Herrera, was a tailor, like his ancestors. His mother, Altagracía Marquinez López, raised a family of four children, two boys and two girls.
Youth (1930s-1940s)

The young Joaquín attended primary school and then the secondary school in Manzanillo. From a very young age he enjoyed drawing and copying paintings. The American presence in Cuba created a divide with the poorer rest of the population, but the children hardly suffered from it. His father wanted the boy to carry on the family tradition, but he was increasingly drawn to the arts. In 1948 he worked for the railway company. Fascinated by aviation, he took flying lessons but gave them up after his first practical attempts.
Havana (1950s)

With his uncle’s support, and against his parents’ wishes, he enrolled at the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts in Havana. He became friends with another student, Agustín Cárdenas. With a few other students, he was given board and lodging at the Castillo del Príncipe prison near the school, a facility reserved for penniless students. At that time, outside the school, he was already seeing another future painter, Jorge Camacho. Their elder, Wifredo Lam, advised him to give up the classes at the School of Fine Arts, which he considered of little use. Joaquín Ferrer took this advice. In 1954 he showed his work for the first time at the painting salon of the Museum of Modern Art in Havana, and in other Latin American capitals. He married Gina Pellón Blanco, from whom he separated, officially divorcing in 1971. His first solo exhibition was held in 1955 at the La Rampa gallery in Havana, followed in 1956 by the Lyceum gallery and in 1957 by the Color Luz gallery. He worked at the Museum of Modern Art with Cárdenas and Estopiñán, and in a small gallery, the Centro de Arte Cubano, opposite the cathedral. He made prints and, at the Museum of Modern Art, a mosaic whose signature is marred by a typo reading “Ferret”. The revolution of 1958-1959 in Cuba caused a great stir around the world. In 1959 he received a grant from the Ministry of Education to study abroad. Sailing on the Reina del Mar, he arrived at La Rochelle on 8 December and went on to Paris.
Paris (1960s)

In Paris the intellectual world was in a ferment of pro-Cuban enthusiasm. He lodged at the Cité universitaire; Lam and Cárdenas welcomed and advised him. The monthly grant of 100 dollars arrived irregularly, but the Maison de Cuba was tolerant. He eagerly visited the museums and galleries of Paris and took French lessons at the Alliance française. In 1961 he exhibited among the “Contemporary Cuban Artists” at the Galerie du Dragon and then at the Galerie Epona. The Maison des jeunes in Clichy showed “Cuba and Cubans”, and in 1962 he took part in the group exhibition “Latin American Art” at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. In 1963 he took part in the 3rd Paris Biennale at the Musée d’Art Moderne. At a group exhibition at the Le Ranelagh cinema-gallery he had his first contacts with Surrealism. He moved into a studio in Pigalle. For almost two years a group of art lovers each gave him enough to live on. His first exhibition at the Galerie Maya in Brussels, and in the Netherlands. From then on he exhibited regularly at the Galerie du Dragon and in many group exhibitions and salons: Réalités Nouvelles, Grands et Jeunes d’Aujourd’hui, Comparaisons, etc. He often saw other Cubans in Paris, among them Alejo Carpentier. He met André Breton, Jean Benoît and Édouard Jaguer at the Galerie L’Œil during the exhibition “L’Écart absolu”. He met Alain Bosquet, through whom Max Ernst asked to meet him. In 1967, taking part in the exhibition “Artists in Solidarity with Israel”, he came into contact with the members of its honorary committee: Max Ernst, Joan Miró, André Masson and Marc Chagall. Ernst visited his studio and bought three paintings, then invited Jean Hugues, Alexandre Iolas and Bertie Urvater to his home. Hugues asked to see him the next day and offered him an exhibition at his gallery, Le Point Cardinal. The Point Cardinal exhibition was prefaced by a captioned drawing-collage by Max Ernst. The student revolts of that May did not hamper the commercial success of the exhibition. It was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration: he received a monthly stipend and was exhibited regularly for ten years. His daughter Monia was born in December 1968.
1970s-1980s

The painter’s life now became settled. Living on boulevard Brune from 1977, he married Anne Jézéquel (died 1993), the mother of his daughter, in 1978. In 1979 he became a French citizen. He developed a passion for non-European art. His days were spent in his studio or with his friends: Lam, Ernst, Camacho, Cárdenas, Matta, Miró, Luca, the ever-loyal Bosquet and many others. He travelled (Mexico, Italy, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands) and often spent his summer holidays with Urvater in Palma de Mallorca. Solo exhibitions followed one another: at Le Point Cardinal, but also in Geneva (Engelberts), Brussels (Epsilon) and Lima (Camino Brent)…
1990s-2000s

His daughter Aïa was born in 1992. In 1996 he married Christiane Créteur, her mother.

The monograph Joaquín Ferrer, l’imaginaire absolu, with a text by Lionel Ray, was published in 2001 by éditions Palantines. A retrospective of Joaquín Ferrer’s work was organised on the initiative of the Maison de l’Amérique latine in 2016.

Artist: Joaquín Ferrer

From 3 March to 28 May 2020
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

Metcalf was born in New York. His parents were both stained-glass artists, who notably contributed to the windows of the Cathedral of St John the Divine. Metcalf took up art and sculpture as a teenager. At 18 he enlisted in the US Army’s 88th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Blue Devils. Metcalf fought in northern Italy during the Second World War and lost three fingers in combat at the Furlo Pass.

Metcalf attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, then enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He received a grant to study ancient metalworking and moved to Deià, Mallorca, in 1953. He befriended the writer Robert Graves and collaborated with him on his book Adam’s Rib, published in 1955. Metcalf lived in Paris from 1956 to 1965, where he had his studio in the Impasse Ronsin.

By 1965 Metcalf was an accomplished sculptor, with a studio on Spring Street in SoHo. However, he had grown tired of contemporary art and moved to Mexico. He befriended eminent writers and artists, among them Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Pellicer, and was the first to introduce Octavio Paz to Marcel Duchamp. Metcalf won the commission to forge the Olympic torch for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. He was married to the Mexican actress Pilar Pellicer, his third wife, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Metcalf later married Pilar Pellicer’s younger sister, the sculptor Ana Pellicer, his fourth wife.

Metcalf opened a studio and forge in 1967, where he taught artisans how to make vessels with a thick rim known as el borde grueso. In 1973 Metcalf and Ana Pellicer founded the Casa de Artesanías and a school, which would become known as the Adolfo Best Maugard School of Arts and Crafts, in Santa Clara del Cobre, to promote indigenous artists and pre-Columbian coppersmithing and forging techniques. Their work has been credited with preserving the region’s metalworking.

Metcalf died in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, on 27 January 2012, aged 86, survived by his wife, Ana Pellicer. He was buried in Santa Clara del Cobre, near several of his sculptures.

From 24 January to 29 February 2020
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

Artists shown:

P. BETTENCOURT
DADO
ERRO
LJUBA
H. MICHAUX
J. RISPAL
O. SABAN
YOSHIKO
and Paul-Émile VICTOR

From 28 November 2019 to 11 January 2020
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

In 1917, America had just entered the war against Germany. A noble and most eccentric Germanic stork, or was it a crane, often arrested for bathing in public fountains, devised a hoax to pester* the art of those males of the Society of Independent Artists in New York.
She sent the salon a urinal, which she signed R. Mutt. She did not send a bidet, originally intended for intimate ablutions in brothels. She did not send a WC bowl open to all sexes. No, she had a urinal sent from Philadelphia, one bound to the male member. The urinal was refused and was not exhibited.
A sly fox crossed with a handsome pig appropriated the object, sting and all. The muttation and the stroke of genius did their work. The object was consecrated, and in consecrated there is sacred.
The fable is no bed of roses for the rare bird. “C’est la vie”, some will say. But every fable has a moral: the fountain-woman has only one name! “Dada Baroness”!
And in this story, art history gets it in the backside!

24 December 2018

Canuler: to pester
Mutatis mutandis: adverbial phrase (Latin, changing what must be changed; making the necessary changes).

THE BARONESS IN BED

The baroness in bed sleeps naked. In her dream she strokes her tail like a big brush with which she paints. The baroness does not paint with a donkey’s tail (the baroness in bed is not Boronali1); she paints a bidet with her ponytail on the canvases of her sheets.
If Dada Baroness 2 dreams that she paints a horse with her hair, it is because the baroness shaves, shaves, shaves in bed, shaves her scalp.
The baroness also shaves her pubic hair3. She shaves and shaves because she is bored, and a hundred nights is a long time, and without night you lose your head, especially a shaven one.
22 December 2018, on waking
1. Boronali was Lolo, the donkey belonging to Père Frédé, owner of the Lapin Agile. The animal’s tail had painted the picture Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique, which caused a scandal in 1910. The donkey was turned into the painter Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, an anagram of Aliboron…
2. Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was nicknamed Dada Baroness in avant-garde New York. Her eccentricities (dresses covered in spoons, shaved head, black lips, stamps stuck on her cheeks…) were famous. She collected stray dogs. Her fountain was in fact meant to be shown where the dogs of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show paraded. In English, mutt means a mongrel (of mixed breed) but also the backside. In one of her poems she calls Marcel Duchamp, with whom she was madly in love, “my arse”. R. Mutt, pronounced “armutt” in German, means wretched, poor in spirit. Of course Mutt also suggests Mutter, her mother, who died of the effects of syphilis, from which she too would suffer, a disease perhaps transmitted by an abusive father.
3. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray made the film The Baroness Shaves Her Pubic Hair, a film now lost.

In a letter made public in 1983, Marcel Duchamp wrote to his sister: “Tell this detail to the family: the Independents have opened here with great success. One of my female friends, under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture. It was not at all indecent, no reason for refusing it…”
Marcel Duchamp said of “Dada Baroness”: “The baroness is not futurist. She is the future.” 102 years later, it is time to celebrate the originality of this vogelfrei artist, an exceptional outlaw. Part of the exhibition Muttatis Muttandis evokes the richness of her personality. The day has come to render unto Elsa what belonged to Marcel.

Artist: Lou Dubois

From 25 October to 27 November 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

Mainly works from the 1960s and 1970s, but also a selection of important drawings from the 1980s and 1990s.

A rare exhibition bringing together more than 40 drawings.

Artist: Fred Deux

From 20 September to 12 October 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

MR. DJUB

“I made my first collage in 1983. I was 14, I was a punk, I made fanzines. It was a time when all the layouts were made by hand… In France, the punk and Situationist legacy was already well established. Collage was therefore a natural practice, but used above all politically, in the spirit of the slogan. Collage has a fascinating history. Some trace it back to Charles Dufresny in the eighteenth century. For my part, I feel an emotional bond with the Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, and of course with the Surrealists, particularly Max Ernst: that is the precise period I am most attached to. Then I like the way the Art Brut people moved things on by combining techniques, going from paper to objects to tell their own stories. Collage is more a shared practice than a movement as such; it is a reality. On the other hand, one state of mind binds collagists together: the Stakhanovism of the whole business. They are all scalpel fanatics who want to make a new meaning, a mischievous subversion, spring from foreign material. And the real point in all this is how far you are able to push the exercise. I also think one has to distinguish collagists from computer addicts and digital assemblage. I work only with newspapers published between 1840 and 1880, for the sake of consistency. One of the advantages of collage is precisely its lack of reference points. In that sense no dogma confines its practice, so it has no defined school, and I love that, as someone who claims to be self-taught, having been thrown out of the national education system at 16. Ernst said: ‘If it is the plumes that make the plumage, it is not the glue that makes the collage.’ In art, nothing can be reduced to a technique.”

Artist: Mr. Djub

From 24 May to 30 June 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

Artists shown:

Maurice Baskine

Guido Biasi

Jorge Camacho

Adrien Dax

Gabriel Der Kervorkian

Jacques Lacomblez

Yves Laloy

Gherasim Luca

Endre Rozsda

Jean-Claude Silbermann

Ugo Sterpini

Max Walter Svanberg

Jean Terrossian

From 18 April to 18 May 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

His father, a bookseller, stationer and printer, and his mother, a musician, passed on to him a taste for printing, books, reading, writing and drawing.
The family left Algeria in 1938 for Rodez, where Jean-Pierre began to draw, self-taught.

His first exhibition, of drawings on the theme of the landscapes of the Rouergue, was held in Rodez in 1950. From these years in the Aveyron our artist remembers his admiration for Max Ernst, Robert Motherwell and Gustav Klimt, and his meetings with Pierre Soulages.
In 1952 he moved to Paris, dividing his time between Éméville (Oise) and Montparnasse.

A highly significant encounter for Jean-Pierre Vielfaure came in 1956: the German painter Carl Buchheister (1890-1964), whom he would name as his spiritual father in painting and whom he would host at Éméville for six months of every year. C. Buchheister was a very close friend of Wassily Kandinsky, Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters; from the last two he above all retained “non-exclusive geometric constructions” and “collages in a Surrealist spirit”, while his own membership of the Hanover School can be read in his propensity to “cut up his canvases, with lines, into flat areas of bright colour”. And, again according to Jacques Busse, the pictorial aim of Buchheister, which Vielfaure would claim as his own, can be defined as: “attempting to give concrete form to the synthesis of apparently heterogeneous elements, reconciling a geometric construction of the picture plane with a gestural poetics of the Informel, without giving up an amused recourse to the post-Dada materials of collage”.

In 1958 Jean-Pierre Vielfaure became friends with Édouard Jaguer and joined the Phases movement. Jean-Pierre Vielfaure and Wifredo Lam, with lithographs, and Remo Martini, with woodcuts, illustrated the tenth issue, in 1965, of this limited-edition bibliophile review, entitled
Phases – Cahiers internationaux de recherches littéraires et plastiques (ed. Paul Facchetti).

By joining the Inter group in 1965, formed mainly of Scandinavian artists,
Jean-Pierre Vielfaure began a long relationship with the city of Copenhagen, through stays and exhibitions as well as editions of his prints.

Between 1968 and 1971, while also contributing illustrations to the magazine Rock & Folk, Jean-Pierre Vielfaure undertook his “monumental” work entitled Opéra Civilisation, a series of seventy-two paintings (collage, acrylic, mixed media) set side by side over a length of forty-two metres in which, as Sébastien Moinet-Béchar comments, “the historical, ideological and artistic story of our civilisation is evoked, from the creation of the world to our unknown future”.

In 1970 Vielfaure spent a long period in Lapland, and in Ibiza. His returns to the island inspired the series of more than fifty canvases (1970-1973) all entitled Les portes d’Ibiza, shown in turn in Ibiza, Copenhagen and Helsinki in 1973. His first long stay in New York and Canada, in 1977, gave rise to a series of mixed-media works, Journal new-yorkais, mainly on paper and presented as diptychs in which writing, collage and abstraction sit side by side.

In 1988 he set up his studio in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the Manufacture des Œillets.

His series of paintings L’appel aux esprits (2007) gave Jean-Pierre Vielfaure the opportunity to speak about his own spirituality: “It began in Scandinavia. There, where I sold a thousand canvases in twenty-five years, I saw all the museums concerned with shamanic rites… Being self-taught, my curiosity remains open and intact. Although I was brought up among Catholics, my spirituality leans rather towards the shamans. Each shaman has his own spirituality, in relation to the clouds, or wood, or a particular animal. Shamanism is my true religion. It opens onto another world.”

Artist: Jean-Pierre Vielfaure

From 1 to 13 April 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

Artists shown:
Guy Harloff
Jorge Vigil

From 25 January to 9 March 2019
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e

Stanislao Lepri, born in Rome in 1905, came from an aristocratic family that had sworn loyalty to the Pope. Following family tradition he embarked on a diplomatic career, which he gave up for painting (his first exhibition dates from 1945).

In 1942 he met Leonor Fini, and lived…

Artist: Stanislao Lepri