Work Hard | ArtInfo | Scott Indrisek
Mar 12 2015
Valentin Carron curates a show that is almost comically diverse. The gallery space is divided into four rooms, sort of like a barebones house, and all the walls are spraypainted a metallic silver. There’s sculptural furniture: a neon-and-fur chair by Trix and Robert Haussmann from 1967, a bronze table with bird-legs by Meret Oppenheim. There’s clothing: a pile of shoes in Latifa Echakhch’s “Skin,” or a dangling line of baseball caps in Simon Paccaud’s “Crocodile.” Architecture gets a nod, too, with Fabrice Gygi’s “Tente-Bar,” a tarp-based structure that resembles a sadly empty little booth that you might find selling food and booze at a country fair. Interspersed throughout there’s some meh abstraction and minimalist painting (like Sylvain Croci-Torti’s “Lost in Confusion,” 2014, a mostly-monochrome canvas interrupted by a trickly vertical slit, sort of an exhausted version of Barnett Newman’s zip). But the lackluster notes are tempered by cool weirdness: A Mai-Thu Perret rattan sculpture of a donkey; a suite of early-20th-century drawings by Marguerite Burnat-Provins in which cats or swans play with disembodied human heads; and funky, small sculptures by David Hominal which place discrete objects — one of which looks a whole lot like a used crack pipe — atop painted metal cans.