Press

Andrew Lewis
Revue de presse
Press review
W W W.G A L E RIE A R T C ONC E P T.C OM
Anaël Pigeat, «Andrew Lewis», in Art Press, n°397, février 2013, p.30
Claire Moulène, «Compressions picturales», in Les Inrockuptibles, n°889, 10-12 décembre 2012, p.112
«Andrew Lewis», in Mousse, n°36, décembre-janvier 2012, p.237
«Andrew Lewis, Les filtres harmoniques», in Paris Art, 21 novembre 2012
Communiqué de presse, We Wykehamisys, Gallery Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam, Holland, 16.01 - 28.02.2010
Andrew Lewis
Pioneer Association
Art: Concept, Paris
Opening March 14
4 - 9pm
03.14 - 04.18.2009
For his second personal exhibition at art : concept in Paris, Andrew Lewis shows paintings depicting his personal version of
Western mythic explorations.
Compressing time and space, a series of nine paintings superimpose the Pioneers’ imaginary and American spatial conquest.
Rather than focusing on aspects such as patriotic clichés or historical impacts usually associated to those human and technological adventures, Andrew Lewis creates landscapes and scenes where hybrid means of transport combine horses-drawn carts
and lunar modules.
Thus, the artist highlights the poetics of technological and social evolutions considering them as a progress. However, Lewis’ s
sci-fi universe convey all the ambivalence of such a notion. The fictitious parallel between those historical periods points out the
inevitable, repetitive and cyclic mechanism: invention, amazement, boredom. According to the artist, this logic arises from technological innovations, and can be understood as a common principle to our personal lives. Excited by anything new at its beginning, we enthusiastically adopt innovations, then getting used to them, we consider them as normal, banal, and finally boring.
Pioneers’ Association also deals with the banal, but not only as a counterpoint of changes or inventions. Lewis perpetuates an
artistic practice, that, from 17th century Dutch painting to Warhol, has been literally celebrated the everyday repetitions, and the
banality of our lives.
With regard to his previous works gathered in the exhibition “Couronne Impériale”, Lewis’s narratives follow the recurrent theme
of displacement encouraged by the search of an elsewhere or a lost paradise. Moving structures – carts or lunar modules always accompany utopias. Made to transport bodies, they function here as symbols for bodies.
Andrew Lewis’ aesthetical interest in the body is one of the links between the nine paintings series and the paintings gathered
in the second room. Some of those ten other works echo late 19th century paintings such as interior genre scenes and figures
studies. Thus, the artist multiplies points of view and approaches explorations in a wider and metaphorical sense.
Venus and Apollo represents two children standing on each side of a console table and carefully looking at a decorative sculpture displayed on its top. However, the title confirms the first impression given by this small sculpture. Here does not stand the
expected artwork usual to a genre scene, but a small-scale representation of Apollo lunar capsule. In the background, an antic
Greek Venus sets up a symmetrical compositional effect responding to the Apollo bronze model. Lewis considers the antique
sculpture as well as the popular culture icon, both those topics are equally worthwhile. The lunar capsule is a metaphor for the
body and for desire, such as the Apollo-and-Venus myth which is, among others, an allegory of passion and love.
Therefore, Andrew Lewis creates a narrative based on the body metamorphosis, its displacements, and their representations
(image, sculpture or technological objects). His new paintings series embrace many layers of what exploration means, from the
geographical fact to the invisible one that any man does in his own interior world. In Holding a lantern in her hand, the teenage
girl laying on a couch is looking at a flame emerging from the dark. Seen from behind, her head leaning on her elbow, she embodies this state of consciousness: the instant of tranquillity linked to the desire of being somewhere else.
Andrew Lewis
Pioneer Association
Art: Concept, Paris
Vernissage 14 mars
16h - 21h
14.03 - 18.04.2009
Pour sa seconde exposition personnelle à la galerie art : concept à Paris, Andrew Lewis nous livre une version subjective
d’explorations devenues mythiques dans l’histoire de l’Occident.
Une série de neuf peintures superpose l’imaginaire des pionniers avec celui de la conquête spatiale américaine. Andrew Lewis
compresse le temps et l’espace, mais ne focalise pas sur les clichés patriotiques ou sur la grandiloquence historique généralement portés par ces aventures humaines et technologiques. Il crée des paysages et des scènes étranges où apparaissent des
éléments hybrides, tels des moyens de transports qui combinent les modules lunaires avec des carrioles typiques de la conquête
de l’Ouest.
Ainsi, l’artiste révèle la poésie de ces évolutions sociales et technologiques qu’il considère comme des progrès. Cependant, cet
univers proche de la science-fiction traduit l’ambivalence de la notion de progrès. La fiction engendrée par le parallèle entre
ces deux périodes historiques indique l’inévitable répétition d’un cycle dont les différentes étapes sont l’invention, l’émerveillement et l’ennui. Selon l’artiste, cette logique s’applique, au-delà des découvertes technologiques, à nos propres vies. Le principe
est récurrent : lorsqu’une nouveauté arrive, nous l’adoptons avec enthousiasme et émerveillement, puis nous nous y habituons
et finalement la trouvons banale, puis ennuyante. L’exposition Pioneers’ Association traite donc également du banal, mais pas
uniquement en tant que contrepoint du changement ou de l’invention. Lewis perpétue un art qui, depuis la peinture flamande du
17ème siècle jusqu’à Warhol, consiste à célébrer les répétitions de notre quotidien et la banalité de nos vies.
Par rapport aux œuvres rassemblées lors de l’exposition “Couronne Impériale” en 2005, Lewis poursuit une narration dont le
thème récurrent est le déplacement lié à la recherche d’un ailleurs ou d’un paradis perdu. Les structures mobiles (carrioles
ou modules lunaires), qui accompagnent la réalisation de ces utopies, sont autant de moyens de transport que de symboles du
corps.
L’intérêt esthétique d’Andrew Lewis pour le corps est un des liens entre la série de neuf peintures et celle présentée dans la
seconde salle. Certaines de ces dix autres huiles sur bois font écho à des scènes de genres de la fin du dix-huitième siècle.
D’autres évoquent le romantisme et l’Orientalisme des études de figures du 19ème siècle. Ainsi, l’artiste multiplie les points de
vue et aborde le thème de l’exploration au sens métaphorique du terme.
Venus and Apollo représente deux enfants qui observent attentivement une statue décorative. Cependant, le titre confirme la
première impression laissée par cette petite sculpture. Il ne s’agit pas du type d’œuvre décorative qui figure habituellement dans
de telles scènes d’intérieur. En effet, la statue est une représentation à échelle réduite de la capsule lunaire Apollo. À l’arrièreplan, une Vénus grecque antique fait pendant à la statue en bronze d’Apollo. Lewis considère qu’Apollo, module lunaire devenu
icône populaire, est autant digne d’intérêt que la Vénus antique. Tout comme la capsule lunaire est une métaphore du corps et du
désir d’ailleurs, le mythe grec d’Apollon et Vénus est, entre autres, une allégorie où le corps métamorphosé symbolise l’impossible accomplissement du désir.
Le corps, ses déplacements réels ou imaginaires et leurs représentations (image, sculpture ou objets technologiques) sont au
cœur des narrations picturales d’Andrew Lewis. Ses deux nouvelles séries de peintures balayent différentes formes d’explorations : depuis l’idée de déplacement géographique jusqu’au voyage invisible que chacun réalise intérieurement au cours d’une vie.
Dans Tenant une lanterne dans la main, une adolescente allongée, vue de dos, regarde une flamme qui émerge de l’obscurité. Elle
incarne un état de conscience transitoire: un instant de tranquillité lié au désir d’être ailleurs.
Anaël Pigeat, «Andrew Lewis» in Artpress, n°357, juin 2009
Bruce Haines, «Andrew Lewis» in Frieze, issue 81, mars 2004.
Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Your bag is a little bit like your studio ; a kind of portable studio, a portable laboratory.
Andrew Lewis: Yes. The exhibition will be rather schizophrenic. One of the reasons for this is that some of the images aren’t very
nice, they are quite disturbed really. Not in a horrible, but more in a low-key kind of way.
Whereas, on the other hand, there are other images and other works that are more ‘up’. They reflect how I was feeling at the
time, and so, this was an honest thing to do.
I got this book for children on how to draw, by an artist who used to work for Disney...
H: And that’s an inspiration for you, that book? Or is it a sort of model?
A: It was a model and an inspiration, because it showed, in schematic kind of way for children, how to draw complicated things,
just by breaking them down from the first line, to something with many lines.
I bought it about nine years ago; and though the front cover is quite ugly, it’s a good book. It does what it sets out to do, in
terms of being instructional. Although beyond the exercises, it doesn’t really go anywhere, and so, subsequently I wanted to
know, what is the point of drawing? It is a good thing to do as an achievement, or as a task, but beyond that, what’s the point? It
is a first-principals question.
I mean, fundamentally, why do people draw things? Is it just to record objects? Or is it for some kind of reason of sentiment?
Why undertake it?
Then, about 2_ years ago, I had this idea of putting the subjects in the book together with how I was feeling, in order to make
pictures; in order to make something which isn’t just a diagram, but that has the most important ingredient which is human emotion. And so, that’s why I did ‘Photo Opportunities’.
There are 50 pictures in the group, because the manual is about how to draw 50 buildings and other structures.
H: So it’s almost like a do it yourself drawing type of thing.
A: Yeah, some of the buildings are quite well-known, like the Empire State Building, or the pyramids of Gyzeh. Others are more
generic, like igloos and log cabins, vernacular structures, anonymous built forms. And then I thought... [this is the book, here]
H: This is the book you found. It’s full of stuff.
A: Yes.
H: It’s another archive. [flicking through the book]
A: (Here’s the Great Wall of China). And so, that was the starting point. A tour of the world. A cheapo tour of the world, infused
with human thoughts and ideas of the world.
I asked two of the assistants at Rochechouart, about how you should translate the phrase ‘Photo Opportunities’, which doesn’t
seem to have a literal translation in French. ‘Points de vues’ was suggested.
Angeline Scherf: What was the name in English?
A: Photo opportunities.
H: Ce sont les lieux où on conseille de prendre une photo.
Laurence Bossé : Oui, oui.
H: ...Touristique, pour ainsi dire. Je ne sais pas ce que l’on dit en français.
AS : Un panorama.
LB : Peut-être.
A : And it’s used in an ironic sense, one example can be of your president and my prime-minister, photographed with some
children, shacking hands. So it can be with famous people, or not so famous people. Like, outside this building, there is a great
potential photo-opportunity with the Eiffel Tower. It could make a great picture.
LB: Un point de vue.
A : Yeah, so that’s what the title is going to be.
H: Of the whole exhibition?
A: Yeah.
H: Here you have the found images? And then you make sculptures, you make drawings. How has the idea of found sources
always played a role?
A: No, not especially, it just seemed to beg to be done, because of how I was feeling. And because I had this idea of putting
prime and shame together. These pictures, and the work I will be showing in Paris, take this idea in a different direction – pride
and shame at the same time.
Ordinarily, when you go to somewhere nice, and have a picture taken, it’s like proof almost, that you were alive. ‘I was here, I
was happy at this moment of my life. I was doing something different. I was doing something I don’t normally do’.
H: So almost a kind of way to say I am still alive.
A: Yes. It serves in that sort of a way, or as if to say ‘I am a good person’. Or, it could be that you go to Disneyland and have
your picture taken next to Mickey Mouse, and that kind of thing. I think it’s a fantastic, a very generous thing for people to want
to do. Especially with children – to take them to different parts of the world – to enrich their souls.
One of the reasons why people go on holidays is to escape their worries, for at least a limited time each year. They save-up and
the hope is to have a good time; and for this to be the highlight of the calendar year. Maybe, sometimes, it’s not possible, at that
particular time, when you have decided to go on holidays, to be as happy as you want to be. Whether because of reasons out of
your control or others. So, for instance, you can go on a 5 hour plane journey across the world with a non-paying-pass-enger;
which is in fact your own unhappiness. And so this is made manifest in these images.
H: So the unhappiness is almost like a personage.
A: Yes.
H: It becomes a personage of your universe.
A: Yes. There’s a famous picture by Poussin of 3 shepherds, and an angel-type figure. On of the shepherds is trying to decipher an
inscription on a tomb (this all takes place in Arcadia. The picture’s title is ‘The Arcadian Shepherds”).
Sheep are peacefully grazing amidst a beautiful landscape. The angel-type figure translates for them tomb-inscription as, ‘even
here, you will find me’. That’s to say, Death.
In the case of my pictures, death is modified to mean unhappiness.
[Then, turning the sourcebook itself, Andrew tries to explain...]
A: At this stage, you just have to schematic collection of lines. And so the next stage is to make it into a composition; into a
picture, putting the subject into whatever appropriate portion of the picture and then, placing the people.
Some of my pictures are cruder than others, but the most important thing is to make them as simple and direct as possible.
They are the kind of pictures you wouldn’t want to have developed, let alone shown in public.
The idea is that the characters in my works are not aware that they are being watched.
[Describing “Le Pont Couvert” to Laurence Bossé]
A : It’s quite comic. They’re a bit lost and she has her fists clenched, she’s rather irritated. It’s a warm day, and they must be
rather sweaty in their leathers.
When the pictures are too heavy, people, I suppose, will have a tendency to laugh at them. It seems a natural emotion to want to
try to make light of a heavy situation. Perhaps this is not a bad thing.
Tchekhov called his dramas, comedies, although people see them in a more tragic sort of way. I wanted to at least be honest
about feelings which people hide a lot of the time.
L: Yes.
A: And even if it’s an unfortunate or melancholic kind of feeling, I wanted to even sometimes make it beautiful. That’s to say that
in spite of the malaise depicted, an air of enchantment exists.
This idea goes back, of course, even further than Poussin. It’s a sensibility which can be found, for example, in depictions of the
crucifixion, painted amidst beautiful landscapes with oblivious grazing animals in the hills.
One finds subjective terror going on in an otherwise flawless environment.
One can lie in a very beautiful place and yet not want to be there, or go to somewhere very attractive, and yet, be unhappy in
one ‘self.
L: For sure.
A: Because of how the people are feeling in the pictures.
People have animated discussions on discussion programmes about the latest film or novel and I feel like saying: ‘Hang on, hang
on’, it’s just make-up, it’s not real anyway.
And yet, I suppose what they are discussing is the level of plausibility involved in the work, even if it is itself fantastical.
And so, although in some other work’s live done, there is a fantasy situation, for example of an aircraft-career on a Georgian
square in London, I still want make it as precise as possible so as to make it seems relatively plausible.
If it was just done as a quick sketch, the viewer would not want to have much time with the work.
H: So, basically, it’s about spending time with the work, and also curiosity and actually wanting to somehow look inside. And
I was interested in this inside kind of thing, because what you can observe is that you know there has been for a long time a
focus on this architectural paradigm of exteriority.
With Frank Gehry and Bilbao, for example. And now we see a return to endeavours and reflections on experiences of interiority.
Your work has quite a lot to do with this interiority in many ways, so could you talk a little bit about this?
A: Yes. As for any background in architecture, I’d like to take this a stage further. Of course formal ideas stop when a building is
constructed and opened. For me, the really interesting point starts when it becomes inhabited by people.
Whether it be an hospital, school, a bank or somewhere you live. The most interesting dramas seem to happen when there are
people involved.
I’m more, or at least, as interested in this element than in purely formal values of one colour or shape or material next to another. In fact, I think the psychological factors are more important.
One of the first pictures in this series I made, whilst still in Britain, was of a castle. Not knowing this, Arielle asked me to do a
picture of the Château. I replied that I had already done it. The work called simply ‘Castle’ is psychic like the others because it
prefigures the emotional trials and dissonances we will at sometimes encounter in our lives.
Somehow, by seeing melancholy in the pictures, the viewer may have these thoughts released in their own minds, and thereby
achieve a state of catharsis.
H: What are your unrealised projects?
A: Sculptures.
H: So, are they buildable?
A: Yes, I think that a building can have its own life by being filmed (or recorded). As I see it, most if not all buildings are locations for some kind of drama. Filmmakers understand that it’s a question of locations.
One of my favourite films is ‘The Ipcress File”, with Michael Caine. It’s a spy-drama from the late 1960’s. If you look at it, it
seems like just a series of locations, whether it’s outside the Royal Albert Hall, or in a park with a band stand.
There are a distinctive series of spaces that the drama happens in – and I like that. I think that’s really what films are about,
they are dreams that take place, more often than not, inside built structures.
H: Yes, for example this Winchester villa. You know that villa. It was the villa of Winchester who invented the rifles, felt all
of the phantoms or ghosts of the dead who had been killed by Winchester. And so, out of this tension, she kept building these
rooms and rooms. The Winchester villa has more than a hundred rooms. So everyday there were people there adding rooms. And
so that is maybe like your idea of rooms and locations.
... But what triggered this very astonishing move from London to Argenton-sur-Creuse. We met each other in the studio of Gilbert
and Georges, and you know, I was very surprised that, suddenly, you turned up in France and you said not that ‘I live in Paris’,
which would have been more excepted, but that you live in Argenton.
What attracted you to this place? Was it a random encounter?
A: Yes, in someways it was random. I mean, well, I’ve wanted to live in France since I was in primary school, since I was about
ten or eleven years old. The school I went to haunt the strange films, like an adventure story set in France. We would go once
every Wednesday to ???????????????????????
Interview With Hans Ulrich Obrist