Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present in its Parisian space, Dessin, a solo exhibition dedicated to Roland Flexner, which also celebrates a more than twenty year collaboration with the artist. The exhibition consists of a group of twenty-one previously unseen works that take the visitor on a voyage through the realms of the artist's imagination.
Born in Nice, France, Roland Flexner lives and works in New York, where he has been based since 1982. For many years, the artist has been producing drawings that explore the interaction between chance and intention. This research began with his Bubble Drawings series in 1995, where the artist used a straw to project a mixture of Indian ink and soapy water onto sheets of paper. Following his residence at the Villa Kujoyama in the Kansai region of Japan, the artist continued his experiments using sumi ink diluted in water.
The artist's physical gestures are hugely important in these works. He manipulates the ink floating on the still fluid surface of the support, before blotting the paper in order to fix the imprint of the image. Once the paper is removed, the artist makes more adjustments. These techniques allow the artist to play on a variety of temporalities: the liquid captures the initial instant when the lines are created, which the artist then manipulates until the ink dries completely. The works are thus shaped into imaginary landscapes, traces and recordings of time itself.
This exhibition brings together two new series of images which, while distinct from the above-mentioned works, follow on from them in a form of continuity. They focus on "the intervention of chance in the emergence of forms, as it counters the routines acquired by the hand", the artist states. Flexner's intimate knowledge of the medium - in this case ink and liquid graphite - together with a range of gestures such as blowing and tilting (use of gravity), soaking and friction, which enable the artist to "push a picture to make a drawing that has pictorial qualities", as he says. Roland Flexner once told the critic and
author Faye Hirsch that his project was twofold: on the one hand, pictorial research, concerned with the production of images, and on the other "a quasi-scientific¹ endeavour, documenting the flow of ink and the characteristics of the medium, which are transformed on the surface of the paper." The American art critic Roberta Smith went as far as describing this methodology as "cataloguing the possibilities of fluidity itself."
Although the twenty-one exhibited works can be seen as an ensemble - they are indeed two distinct series - each drawing possesses a resolutely autonomous character. The works are like "the geology of 'pierres de rêves' (picture stones)", says the artist. The images that appear "are each a unique document of the flow of organic matter, in which chance, acting as both artist and creator, imitates the forms of art", he continues. The French author Roger Caillois coined the term "pierre à image" (image-bearing stone) speaking of a "logic of imagery" inscribed in them that explores the affinities between the complex forms of the mineral world and those created by the human imagination. Like these stones, Roland Flexner's drawings stimulate both the intellectual and sensory perception of the viewer: the eye detects images within the drawings, which seem to appear or disappear at the whim of one's imagination.
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¹Barry Schwabsky from his article: Roland Flexner, D'Amelio Gallery, Artforum, 2012.
