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Mohamed Namou, Guillaume Valenti
Off the Grid

Guillaume Valenti and Mohamed Namou share a common interest in exploring the grids and systems of thought, particularly those that frame the effects produced by images. In line with the research that drives the gallery, the presentation aims to activate the visitor’s gaze, by re-articulating our relationship to the image and the history of art.

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Mohamed Namou

Mohamed Namou’s practice involves an analysis of the paradoxes and limits of the image, through in their capacity to be both signs and mediums. Images for the artist cover an environment of social engineering, used as a potential space to connect and reorganize our perceptions and paradigms. It is in this capacity of images and art objects to signify - in other words, to be a language - that the artist is building his practice. Here, images are analyzed as a social engineering environment, a potential place to connect and reorganize our perceptions and paradigms (ideas). In a form of stretching of abstraction, Mohamed Namou’s new series of works questions the construction and functionality of images, as well as the history of painting and its foundations.

Born in Oran in 1987, Mohamed Namou lives and works in Avignon. He is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2014).

Among his solo exhibitions, his work has been shown at Mor.Charpentier (Paris), Proyectos Monclova (Mexico), Levy.Delval (Brussels), Berthold Pott (Cologne). Among his group exhibitions, his work has been shown at Villa Medicis (Rome), Neuer Kunstverein (Wien), Lewben Art Foundation (Lithuania). Galleria Continua (Boissy-le-Châtel), Kindl Museum and AUTOCENTER, (Berlin).

His work can be found in various public and private institutions such as Lewben Art Foundation (Lithuania), Maria Baibakova Collection (NY, Moscow), ADNCollection (Bolzano), Zabludowicz Collection (London), Fondazione Memmo (Roma) and the Nomas Foundation (Rome).

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Guillaume Valenti

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Parliament - © Paris Internationale

Looking at art is an exercise that constitutes the essence of Guillaume Valenti’s work, its formal and conceptual basis. Inseparable from the history of art that built him, he places his own referential field at the center of his works, and thus a whole cycle of consumption and assimilation of images of art. He apprehends painting as a language with its own games of intertextuality, quotations, and responses; with a grammar of innuendos and deja vus to which everyone contributes, throughout the story. The artist is interested in the image on the wall, or more specifically in the image of the image on the wall. As in theatre, the paintings constitute a synthesis and a mediation of reality in a restricted space-time continuum, a scenic composition that isolates a moment from the common world to then return to it with a different eye. Through this process, the viewer doubles up to see himself seeing in a social theatre of the gaze. By painting spaces of art display —exhibition spaces, screens, art books—Guillaume Valenti questions the balance between the presented artworks and the strategies and codes of monstration - at the risk that the graphic grid prevails over the artworks. Through this process, the artist confronts us with a double mise en abîme: one of the subjects within the subject and of an image that carries the hybridization of hundreds of others.

Guillaume Valenti was born in 1987 in Evry and lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the Beaux-Arts of Paris. His work has been exhibited, among others, at Fondation Lambert, Palais de l’Institut de France, Salon de Montrouge, and CAC Meymac and the Baronian gallery.

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In this re-articulation and awareness of the gaze, “Off the grid” plays on a distortion of scales: there is no right distance to images or proper system into which it exists. Language is lost, context disappears, and the subject (as a “thing to see”) fades. In a present where visual consumption is increasingly frantic - with the risk of becoming superficial and desensitized - both artists interrogate the capacity of images to style act as a language - as a vehicle of meaning outside the surface.

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Parliament - © Paris Internationale
Parliament - © Paris Internationale
Parliament - © Paris Internationale

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