<strong>APPARITIONS COLLECTIVES</strong>

We discovered Heidi Wood’s work in the early 2000’s via a strategy that highlighted the decorative nature of abstract painting. The artist designed domestic settings (such as a living room with wallpaper and a lamp) in which she hung her own abstract compositions. The installation was photographed or its characteristics laid out in a formula, to constitute, in marketing terms, a “serving suggestion”.

This also indicates her interest in the intrusion of corporate economics in the means of producing and exhibiting art. She demonstrates this in a range of means (sometimes as over the top as the economic intrusion is outrageous): distributing her artworks in the form of spams, delegating production, defining a use-by date for her paintings, hanging works in settings similar to trade fair stands, creating works in forms inspired by merchandising…

As an artist in residence or in public art projects, Heidi Wood explores cities that are often unknown and from which she attempts to extract the essence. In an aesthetic similar to geometric painting, her syntheses of the urban environment are translated into pictograms. Like promotional logos, these are printed on cheap materials (plates, postcards, calendar, street sign, etc.) thus maintaining the confusion between various domains.

Accepting the invitation to celebrate the Fracs’ 30-year anniversary allowed Heidi Wood to apply her working methods to a public collection.

In « Apparitions collectives », two directions are developed: presenting the works based on common themes and distilling into pictograms possible syntheses of this collection. For each “apparition” one work is exhibited and others are represented schematically as a wall painting. Four of the 14 pieces created are reactivated in Toulouse after two initial cycles (partners in the Poitou Charentes region, then at the Frac in Angoulême):

- with works by Didier Marcel (Philippe Pareno and Maurizio Cattelan, Pierre Malphettes), structures describe micro-utopias and/or the creation of places that favor interactions. Without being especially revolutionary, the utopia seeks to be relational and starts downstairs ;

- beside the work by Ingrid Luche (Mark Handforth, Mariano Fortuny), ambiguous, poetic, functional or graphic, lights become the raw material for creation;

- J. Duplo’s bricks are typical of the repetitive application of a system. The use of poor and unexpected materials highlights the ingenious and obsessional nature of a gesture ( Nathalie Talec, Vincent Ganivet);

- using digital means to create a formal synthesis, the piece with Delphine Coindet (Xavier Veilhan) can be introduced by: “For me, art is focusing on things we know exist but that we don’t see. I want to create logotypes that place the viewer before a question.” (X.V.)

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<strong>Hélène Dantic</strong>

Text for the catalogue <em>Les Pléiades, 30 ans des Fonds Régionaux d’art contemporain</em>

28/09/2013 - 05/01/2014