Earning stripes: Galeries Lafayette in Paris exhibits a dizzying array of vertical lines

Galerie des Galeries doesn’t have to be a challenging space. The snug, awkwardly shaped first floor at Paris’ Galeries Lafayette department store might have done just as well displaying pretty pictures of vintage clothing modeled by the Paris Match set.
Instead director Elsa Janssen has spun it into a space to be reckoned with, each quarter exhibiting local and international artists in their prime. Most recently she’s invited American Alex Prager to mount her ‘cinema verite’ photographs, and French textile designer Karina Bisch to hang layers of pop-art textiles.
Now Janssen has lent her title to the young Swiss curator Samuel Gross, who has amassed a dizzying spectacle of bandes verticales, or vertical stripes, mostly by his fellow Swiss. His overarching statement? ‘All questions about motifs in Swiss abstract art lead to lines.’
'All Over', running until 14 May, is saturated with intense, grasping, often uncomfortably aggressive vertical lines. To Gross, ‘there is no painting if there is no motif’, and vertical stripes are the ideal motif, the summary of all avant garde thought. In Swiss radical art, the movement in which Gross, a former lecturer at ECAL and Geneva’s High School of Art and Design, has made his home, ‘[vertical stripes are] one of the elements that condense the story of radical painting, ideals of beauty, distilled into a simple, graphic statement’.
For patrons of the Galeries Lafayette, the fashionably graphic work provides an easy entry into Gross’s world. ‘Radical painting is not really complex, and stripes are a very easy way to enter it,’ he says. ‘I really hope this is going to affect people, beauty or not.’
Visitors will observe a largely Swiss body of work, with roots in Russian constructivism and Dutch De Stijl. Foreign exceptions include London’s Ian Davenport, an obvious choice for his oeuvre of glossy multi-coloured stripes, and Venezuelan Domenico Battista, an op artist who cuts together conflicting lines that create moiré waves.
There’s a kinetic rhythm to their work that makes the space appear to vibrate with bold colour and tone. In an angular space at the centre of a shopping mall, the effect is all the more discombobulating.
‘If anything,’ says Gross, ‘it will be amusing. Some people see these radical verticals as something cold and uncompromising. But for me it’s warm, like old friends. Like a cup of tea.’
'All Over', on view until 14 May, is saturated with stripey works, largely from Swiss artists. Pictured: visuals by Denis Roueche
To Gross, ‘there is no painting if there is no motif’, and vertical stripes are the ideal motif – the summary of all avant garde thought. Slow Motion, by Philippe Decrauzat, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Praz-Delavallade
Even the gallery walls have been painted in thick, vertical stripes, emphasising the repetitive nature of the works.
A few pieces, like Untitled (Carambar), by Francis Baudevin, 2013, push the definition of 'stripe' to the limits. Courtesy the artist and Art Concept, Paris
For patrons of the Galeries Lafayette, the fashionably graphic work provides an easy entry into Gross’s world. Pictured: AST117, by Stephane Dafflon, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris
Gross explains, ‘Radical painting is not really complex, and stripes are a very easy way to enter it. I really hope this is going to affect people, beauty or not’. Pictured: Puddle Painting: Swedish Blue, by Ian Davenport, 2009.
Foreign exceptions include London’s Ian Davenport and Venezuelan Domenico Battista. Pictured: Viva duets, by Domenico Battista, 2013.
There’s a kinetic rhythm to their work that makes the space appear to vibrate with bold colour and tone. Pictured: Free Buren, by Sylvie Fleury, 2012.
Gross concludes, 'Some people see these radical verticals as something cold and uncompromising. But for me it’s warm, like old friends. Like a cup of tea’. Pictured: Receiving, by Liam Gillick, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris
INFORMATION
For more information, visit Galerie des Galeries’ website
ADDRESS
Galerie des Galeries
Galeries Lafayette Haussmann
40 Boulevard Haussmann
75009 Paris
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Based in London, Ellen Himelfarb travels widely for her reports on architecture and design. Her words appear in The Times, The Telegraph, The World of Interiors, and The Globe and Mail in her native Canada. She has worked with Wallpaper* since 2006.
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