Nick Mauss and Kianja Strobert exhbition: Hôtel Le Lièvre #3

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce the third iteration of Hôtel Le Lièvre, a series of two-person fortnightly presentations, in which an artist from the gallery invites another artist to present each a single work. The exhibition centres around the Paris gallery building, Hôtel Le Lièvre La Grange, site of an intense cultural and fashion trade now disrupted. The rhythmical reconfigurations of the space perform as an attempt to counter our current sense of detachment.

The third iteration of Hôtel Le Lièvre features the work of Nick Mauss and Kianja Strobert, who expand notions of painting through self-invented poetics of form, material, and image. Both works stress the limits of the frame, margin, memory, and gestural mark to foreground the process of the image becoming an object in the life-world. In If so, 2021, Mauss emphasises the projective nature of drawing by claiming both the space of the page and the wall that supports it. An arrangement of serialised emblems hovers near (as if annotating) a drawing whose descriptive opacity delays immediate legibility. The interrelationship between these fragmentary terms proposes an ongoing, continually expanding grammar. Strobert’s Ohne Titel-B, 2021 appears like a synaesthetic reliquary object that ascribes new feelings to colour, tactility and the decay of sound. Negating the illusionistic function of paint, Strobert instead presents it as a solid volume of colour — a hardened fact of the present which serves as support for a snapshot of hands tentatively playing music. Blotches of paint on the photograph’s surface appear both tender and indifferent. Evidence of being handled by paint-covered fingers, they connect the hand to the eye of both maker and beholder.