Gallery Presentation
The School Gallery, founded in January 2008 by Olivier Castaing, is celebrating its 18th anniversary in January 2025. It is located in the Haut Marais, near the Gaité Lyrique.
Alongside men, Konrad designs objects, famous design chairs. Like an archaeologist, he reconstructs the substrate of the material, gives body to the forms, restores the materials in their smallest details, here the transparency of a plexiglass, on another seat the veins of the wood, the mattness of a brushed steel, the reflections of the light on the seat of a Tolix chair ... nothing is missing and the rendering is astonishing as it is the exact "reproduction" of these iconic seats.
This gallery aims to be a place of discovery and promotion of contemporary art in all its forms, from drawing to installations to video, including sculpture and ceramics, painting, photography, design and architectural creations.
The stand will be dedicated to two artists from the gallery who practice drawing almost exclusively.
The focus will be on Raphaël TACHDJIAN, a thirty-year-old artist who opened the NEW School Gallery program at its Haut Marais site with his second solo exhibition in 2012 with drawings made exclusively in graphite and black stone. This artist displays a virtuoso and precise style and exceptional maturity. His sense of lighting and the intensity of these flat areas sometimes bring to mind Robert Longo's drawings. Raphaël is a storyteller with an infinite imagination, a storyteller who with his black stone makes light burst forth... the dazzling contrast dear to Soulages or Longo is found here in a more modest dimension, of course, but with formats more conducive to intimacy. Like his illustrious elders, with black he draws snow or the immaculate surface of a cup of milk, he draws by subtraction by literally invading the space of his sheet to make white emerge, total or partial covering of black in an obsessive maieutics that could be likened to a mantra. The illusion is perfect as the photographic snapshot works ... the idea is to offer a total immersion in his universe full of a disturbing strangeness ... an exceptional artist.
KONRAD, a French artist, joined the Team School Gallery in the spring of 2016. His portraits of men, bearded, weathered, furrowed, battered by life, stare at you with an intensity rarely equaled in drawing. Executed entirely in ballpoint pen, these drawings demonstrate the acuity of the gaze that this artist has on man and the world in general ... from the infinitely small through trivial details of nature that he scarifies on wood in the shape of a unicorn or a spear, that he tattoos on fragments of polished stones like so many stigmata of an intimate and abundant life. The hyperrealism of Konrad's drawings, his technical virtuosity, the large formats, the blue color of the ballpoint pen, give these faces an aura, a significance, a reality. They give them a place, a space of existence. We think of the photographs of the homeless by Lee Jeffries and, of course, the portraits of Chuck Close. Didn't Chuck Close, also sketched by Konrad, see in a face a "road map of life"?
