Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis, hommage à Ján Mančuška
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France
Boris Ondreička, Eyes (one winking) (2011)
‘Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis’ (The friends of my friends are my friends) is a group show paying tribute to the Czech artist Ján Mančuška, who died prematurely earlier this year. This intimate exhibition presents works especially created or selected for the show by artists with whom Mančuška had close relationships – friendship and/or artistic – offering him a poignant pictorial farewell.
Trevor Lloyd, Untitled Landscape (2011)
The artists in the show either share a certain sensibility with Mančuška or have crossed his path in one way or another: Vladimir Kokolia was his teacher at the Arts Academy in Prague; Josef Bolf (with Jan Serych, Tomáš Vanek) was a member of the BJ group; Laurent Montaron was in residency in New York at the same time as Mančuška; Boris Ondreička played in the acid jazz duo ‘Les Band’ by his side. The works they exhibited contain echoes of the personal relationships they had with Mančuška himself, as well as revealing their shared interest in language. Roman Ondák’s piece Interview (2005), for example, is presented as a hypothetical conversation ‘coincidentally recorded when Roman and Ján met for the first time at an English course for beginners’ (with each new presentation Ondák changes his interlocutor’s name). In Jan Šerých’s traditional crossword puzzle (Untitled, 2011), the words refer to Mančuška’s personality; Ondreicka’s painted concrete poem Eyes (one winking) (2011) is composed of an upper and lower case ‘i’ while Jiri Skala’s video Foreign Bodies (2011) presents four performances in front of four monuments in Brno, during which people read texts of a story that does not exist, perfectly illustrating Mančuška’s games with narrative and time conventions.
Jamie Isenstein, Rug Woogie V (2011)
Other works call upon absence, renunciation or melancholia, such as Trevor Lloyd’s pencil drawing Untitled Landscape (2011), which comes from a series of altered found images of planet Earth in which each work is made by simply eliminating the planet from the ‘landscape’, marking-out everything except selected bits of water, land or clouds, which remain as distant stars, thereby camouflaging the planet into a minimal nightscape. In I’m sorry (2005) Oskar Dawicki, dressed in a shiny blue jacket, confesses, ‘First of all, I’d like to apologize for this exhibition not being as good as it could be. It is as it is, though it could have been different. I’m sorry, really but well … It’s too late now. I apologize, I really apologize to everyone.’ Jamie Isenstein’s wall-mounted guitar (Rug Woogie V, 2011) has strings braided with coloured ropes, rendering it an anti-instrument, unable to produce a sound.
Laurent Montaron, Hypothétique page de la fin du cinquiéme chapitre du Mont Analogue de René Daumal (Hypothetical End Page of the Fifth Chapter of Mount Analogue by René Daumal, 2009)
Ultimately, Laurent Montaron’s piece could be the moral of the exhibition. Hypothétique page de la fin du cinquiéme chapitre du Mont Analogue de René Daumal (Hypothetical End Page of the Fifth Chapter of Mount Analogue by René Daumal, 2009) is a page added by Montaron himself to Daumal’s unfinished novel, on which one can read that once upon Mount Analogue, a group of people met mountain guides singing in a language ‘where syllables with no meaning where juxtaposed one after another’ – just like the works in this exhibition. To which one could add: singing at the top of their voices, but in a poetic chorus.
Timothée Chaillou
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