On the occasion of the 2021 Fiac Online Viewing Rooms, Nara Roesler is proud to present a dialogue between the work of Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik, and French artist Xavier Veilhan, hereby showcased together for the first time. The presentation juxtaposes the work of two artists from different generations and backgrounds, with widely different practices in formal, conceptual, and technical terms, highlighting a punctual and momentary crossing in their engagement with the matter of displacement.
On the one hand, Palatnik's—a seminal figure in the history of kinetic and optical art in Brazil—W-series emerges from a career-long strive for ingenious methods and use of materials, giving rise to a process of deconstruction, reconstruction, and displacement, whereby the artist produced two non-figurative paintings on wooden plates, which are laser-cut into long, thin strips, and subsequently re-assembled and vertically displaced to create a third painting. The series is characterized by permutations that give a sense of infinite projection, an irradiating movement that isn't tamed by the limits of the frame. On the other hand, Xavier Veilhan's Vent Moderne engages with the idea of moving from one place to another and seeking to arrest the 'in-between' moment, upheaving the traditional focus on origin and destination. Instead, the artist reflects on the importance of the path taken from one place to the next, creating landscapes whose carvings evoke the quiver of the wind-shaken horizons, while their longitudinal structure seems to transcend the limits of the surface, perhaps like the image, which exists in relation to what is beyond the frame, as a function of a supposed point of departure and of arrival.
Ultimately, both bodies of work resonate in their creation of formal vibration to evoke movement, displacement—though widely different, both ripple their work intertwining the codes of industrial and artistic practices, seeking to capture a kineticism that results in reverberating formal pieces. Palatnik and Veilhan come to converse in their use of pattern and cuts as a means of triggering the illusion, or the sensation of movement in pieces that echo each other's formal structures, and ultimately coincide in embodying boundless irradiation.
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