Lamarche and Obize, narrating how to think

Valencia,

This year marks twenty since Alexandre Lamarche and Florentine Ovize began working together. Both born in France between the seventies and eighties, they have worked in very diverse media – from drawing and tapestry to ceramics or video installations – often approaching the realm of hybridity.

Among its references it is mandatory to mention the movement Arts and Craftsas they unfold on one support or another, their motifs proliferate and are linked, challenging any form of minimalism and expanding to the walls.

Starting next January 30, the Valencian gallery Luis Adelantado will dedicate a new exhibition to them: “The Foot of the Forest”, which will feature drawings, installations and ceramics. The boundaries between one piece and another will be blurred; The duo does not believe in hierarchies in the field of art, but in the interweaving of materials and symbols.

Their figures, forms and objects incur the paradox of transcending the ornamental while reclaiming that concept: they constitute narrative nodes in their projects that question the existence of barriers between crafts and art; also between the everyday and the elevated, even between myth and the earthly.

The silkscreens, sculptures, drawings and paintings that are part of this proposal have to be interpreted as fragments of a narrative without beginning or end. This story is structured in the drawings and translated into volume and weight in the sculptures and ceramics, while the installations would make up a reading space in which the public will be invited to find rhythms, relationships and sequences between one work and another.

For Lamarche and Ovize, the narrative is not a matter to be illustrated, but a method of creation; even a way of thinking based on objects and materials. And that they wish to convey stories from their pieces does not mean that they pay attention to their formal treatment: to the precision in the graphics, the use of manual procedures and the call to the viewer’s attention of the time and dedication that these imply.

The title of this exhibition, “The foot of the forest”, thus does not refer to a landscape in its literal sense, but to a territory of symbols: the proliferation of plant or animal motifs – and others that fuse them -, accumulating or transforming, evokes the images of ancient bestiaries and those of the decorative repertoires of past eras, but also responds to a very contemporary look in which life and narrative (and ornament) do not constitute independent spheres.

This ambiguity between the known object and the imaginary figure, that which responds to its function and that which springs from the imagination, is especially evident in his sculptures, whose bodies seem to share their origin with the forms that we will contemplate in the works on paper.

Each of the compositions, in one discipline or another, act as feet or trunks to articulate a larger story; More than managing techniques, Lamarche and Ovize create by imagining the relationships of what populates the world, also materials and forms.