Aurélien Froment

Aurélien Froment’s “documentary style” not only reveals existing forms, but it also determines other ways of dreaming them by seeking the right transformation, that enables the past to build a future. The artist aims at making an effort of imagination to connect himself to faraway things in order to put them on a common stage and determine their importance together. In this light, he has conceived the inventory of the elements constituting the Ideal Palace of postman Cheval, a work of architecture which is so intense that only a closer vision may contribute to shedding light on this “work of one man”, concerned about his own pace. What these figures (imaginary animals, plants, ornaments, etc) carved in rock and photographed separately depict, is a different life pulse, a rhythm that the world needs as a kind of support. Aurélien Froment mobilises and engages us through the awareness of singularities like the latter. These pieces translate performative thinking in relation to preexisting works: they seek to stress the path that starts with the gesture and leads towards the form, and vice versa. The exhibition will always be, for the artist, a way of not forgetting what might be called “the arising of the gesture” - the way in which the gesture enables us to truly make use of forms as much as it helps us become receptive. ...

We founded Marcelle Alix in 2009 in Paris and settled in a characteristic, early 20th-century boutique in Belleville. The gallery is for us a creative space, where the dialog with artists is not only meant to selling artworks, but is also based on an equal relationship to creativity. We now represents thirteen artists and two duos. Our identity has been built with the support of the artists who opened our programme (Aurélien Froment, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Charlotte Moth, Ernesto Sartori, Marie Voignier) and those we introduced to the French art scene (Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Ian Kiaer, Donna Gottschalk). During these years, we have supported broad artistic careers (Laura Lamiel, Liz Magor and Mira Schor whose work we represent exclusively in Europe) and accompanied the development of new perspectives in sculpture (Gyan Panchal, Jean-Charles de Quillacq) in video (Lola Gonzàlez), and in drawing (Armineh Negahdari). Our gallery has been a pioneer in defining a space for queer art in France : in addition to showing her work within the artist duo Boudry/Lorenz since 2011, we have directed the translation into French of Renate Lorenz's 2012 seminal book, « Queer Art » in 2018. Since 2019, we have exhibited photographs by Donna Gottschalk documenting the lives of women living with women who were involved in the lesbian movement in the United States in the 1970s. In 2023 we organised an exhibition for the Utopi.e award—first award in France for Lgbtqi+ art—for which we have invited Paris galleries Air de Paris and Sultana as fellow participants. We insist on the central role of a gallery in the ecosystem of art as a place to make idiosyncratic positions visible and weave a critical narrative around the most contemporary visual forms. ...