Shelter Press – förlag

Text by David Ivar (english)Interview with Delphine Horvilleur (french + english)

With the same image of Freud’s divan on its front and back covers, Orion Aveugle, Anne Laure Sacriste’s new artist’s book, offers a selection of recent paintings marked by an intensification of the characteristics we have come to know: monochrome grounds, vegetal motifs and visual anamneses. Borrowing the principle of free association (here, of pictures) from psychoanalysis, she also includes a fragment from Nicolas Poussin’s Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun. This is her simultaneous subversion of the ideals of classical clarity and analytical decoding: we can see only thanks to blindness and dazzlement.

Artists never stop exploring the approach they take towards their art. The mind state, the intention of thought that is present when creating a work of art is something that is continually revised and reaffirmed. From the subconscious dotting of Jill Mulleady’s colourful abstractionism, to the unexpected obscuring dabs placed on the faces of Lindsey Bull’s cabalistic subjects, to Maria Thurn und Taxis’s, the three artists employ different ways of enacting the ritual of painting.

From the french alps to new mexico, passing by Big Sur California, Felicia Atkinson & Bartolomé Sanson has been doing researches about the influences of the beat generation on the formations of the contemporary art. How to be unsettled and in the meantime on site, connected to the landscape, ping-ponging from music to poetry, inside and outside the gallery space and the book form. Blurring everyday the frontier between genres, this book conceived as an on-site exhibition presents found images, sculptures, poetry and painting.

A queer travelogue of a boating voyage on Belgium’s inland waterways with merman and singer Steev Lemercier in the company of Chanel and Dolce, who are a cat and a dog, during the first months of their friendship with the author.

IT’S ALIVE! à travers l’oeuvre de Gisèle Vienne, the new book from French photographer Estelle Hanania, gathers over ten years of collaboration and archives revolving around the artistic universe of Gisèle Vienne. A subjective monography on the choreographer’s work, the present book makes for one of Estelle Hanania’s densest cluster of images to date, arraying a collection of photographs that spans from 2008 to 2019. For Estelle Hanania, whose work has previously been featured twice by Shelter Press, the human body has proven to be a limitless source of inspiration. Her ability at capturing the essence of Gisèle Vienne’s vision, through her acute visual understanding of bodies and objects, as well as her knack for building natural bridges between Gisèle’s performances and the whole of her photographic endeavour, make this new publication a much essential milestone in Estelle’s career. Shaking up the foundations of the classic live-performance book as we know it, It’s Alive! offers a singular take on the work of Gisèle Vienne, inviting the reader to look from beyond the stage’s borders, taking a step back and shifting perspectives, allowing to envision the whole of Vienne’s body of work under a fresh new light; the heart of the book deploying in truly free and sensible fashion, while eschewing the chronological, and/or thematic approach usually associated with such efforts. An ambitious photographic project in full resonnance with Shelter Press’ aspirations, it is with particular emotion that we welcome this title, reference SP100, to the fold – a number bound to establish as a landmark issuing in our catalogue.

Photographies du soir consists of a series of images taken by Julien Carreyn between 2014 and 2017. Placing with a formidable precision a self-published editorial practice at the heart of his artistic production, Julien Carreyn offers withPhotographies du soir a singular and ambitious publication that presents for the first time his photographic work on color. This series of 41 images is followed by texts by art critic Claire Moulène and Scottish artist Mick Peter. “It is always precious to know what artists look at, what works, in the mille-feuille of art history, by some genealogical or aesthetic turn, had vampirized their imagination. It is often surprising. In the case of the author of Photographies du soir, we are surprised and almost immediately enchanted by the disorderly voyage he proposes: by way of Matisse and therefore his paradise, Bonnard and Corot, but also the vampire films of Jean Rollin on the banks of the Loire and Les Noces rouges by Chabrol; the pastel interiors by Marc-Camille Chaimowicz and the indecipherable though highly erotic photographs by the painter David Salle. Each image of this book, as modest as it may be, contains a little of all that. As much as they individually cultivate a certain sulky and lascivious monotony, involving the same portraits of well-bred heroines, with ankle-length pants and sweaters pulled up to conceal cleavage; the same Day in the Country on the banks of the river, dormitories with unmade beds, deserted shopfronts on provincial main streets and declining summer evenings; they carry within them, collectively, this cultural density, this consistency. Because it’s by putting things end to end that we manage to bring the underground labyrinth into the light. And by putting image on page, that we give body to this occult matrix. ”Claire Moulène, 2018

This catalog presents a series of vases produced by designer matali crasset during a residence at the national porcelain manufactory of Sèvres, in France. Polaroids of vases photographed by Julien Carreyn, drawings by crasset and miscellaneous documents. Matali Crasset and Julien Carreyn have known each other for years. During a residency at the Manufacture in Sèvres, France, the designer invited the artist and photographer Julien Carreyn to capture his current project, the capes, a collection of porcelain vases. This book proposes a dialogue and a game of four hands around these vases, the first vases of matali crasset, and drawings made for an exhibition in Monaco. A series of polaroids and digital photographs of Julien Carreyn come to dialogue with these drawings of matali crasset, as well as with sketch drawings from the catalog of the Manufacture. The absence of text feeds on a railway that develops a narration between these elements. More than reveal the vases, the images turn, they are keys, clues that are given.

Following her Shelter Press debut (les capes / SP097), in collaboration with The Cultural Gallery, Monaco, paris-based designer matali crasset shares today the second output in our publication series together. ‘wood’ presents the ‘maisons sylvestre’, four small dwellings or ‘feral houses’ located within the 5000-hectares forest of the dompcevrin, fresnes-au-mont, lahaymeix, nicey-sur-aire, pierrefitte-sur-aire and ville-devant-beirain along the sentier du vent pathway in France. Revolving around those cabins, a spoon, a chair, blankets and apples are shown in the book. FRANCAIS Deuxième collaboration entre matali crasset et Shelter Press et The Cultural Gallery Monaco, le livre ‘wood’ présente les ‘maisons sylvestres’, projet réalisé avec Vent des Forêts situées au cœur du département de la Meuse, dans 5000 hectares de forêts, à proximité des villages de Dompcevrin, Fresnes-au-Mont, Nicey-sur-Aire, Pierrefitte-sur-Aire et Ville-devant-Belrain. Autour de ces maison gravitent des cuillères, des couvertures, une chaise, et des pommes.

Judy Chicago says she wants to live as long as possible; not to transcend her mortal condition, but to be around as her works successively find recognition. A woman holding out against all odds: such is the image of an artist more a visionary than the pioneer she has so often been described as. Unlike the pioneers, Chicago has never joined the “greats” of the white, modernist, Eurocentric canon. Rather she has avoided this historical snare, urging instead the alternatives of to sustain the vision. Géraldine Gourbe is a philosopher, author, art critic, and curator.

Every change of context, every change of medium can be interpreted as a negation of the status of a copy as a copy—as an essential rupture, as a new start that opens a new future. In this sense, a copy is never really a copy; rather a new original in a new context. Every copy is by itself a flâneur—experiencing time and again its own “profane illuminations” that turn it into an original. It loses old auras and gains new auras. It remains perhaps the same copy, but it becomes different originals. —Boris Groys, Going PublicFlâneurs results from curatorial research carried out by independent curator Francesca Zappia within the plethoric collection of the Centre national des arts plastiques, which focused on the contested notions of copies, appropriations and quotations. Drawing on art and design objects from the nineteenth century to today, she shows how reproductions of artworks can be considered as objects with a cultural value of their own and be regarded in the same way as the originals. The book follows a spatial structure. Guided by an interview between Francesca Zappia and Juliette Pollet, curator at the Cnap, the reader walks through an imaginary and deliberately anachronistic museum. The rooms devoted to the Antiquities, the Renaissance, the 17th and 18th centuries, and the modern and contemporary periods bring together more than 300 works and forge new links between them. Throughout the chapters, the reader also meets the artists Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Aurélien Mole and Matthew Darbyshire who, each in their own way, open up additional perspectives of research.