Les Choses Perdues

About

Vegas invites you to celebrate the forthcoming programme in the new space on 45 Vyner Street. VEGAS GALLERY IS MOVING SPACE Vegas Gallery is moving out of Redchurch Street after 3 successful years in the Oaklands' basement and is delighted to announce its new location from January 2010 : 45 Vyner Street. The opening of the new space will coincide with the private view on 14 January 2010 of a curated exhibition ‘Les Choses Perdues' focusing on painters working with the notion of found and archival materials and the collective consciousness. We invite all of our friends and supporters to join us in the celebratory launch of a new space and a new exhibition. Please change all mail-out addresses to our new address: VEGAS Gallery,45 Vyner Street, LONDON E2 9DQ Les Choses Perdues - Group Exhibition 15 January/ 14 February 2010 Private View: Thursday 14 January 18:30 - 21:00 curated by ken Pratt Bracha Ettinger Joris Ghekiere Geraldine Gliubislavich Karin Hanssen Alex Hudson Vegas is pleased to present ‘Les Choses Perdues', a special project curated by Ken Pratt as the opening show for its new gallery space in Vyner Street. If the twentieth century can be called the century of ‘the image', it now seems that we have entered the era of ‘the archive'. It is not hard to understand how and why ‘the archive' has emerged as a discernable current locus for artistic and curatorial investigation and intervention. Just as the progress of image-making technology in the twentieth century builds a momentum for the late twentieth century painters engaging with ‘the (moving) image', it is inevitable that the rapid advancement of digital storage, manipulation and sharing mechanisms would contribute to more recent explorations of the mass, the pool; the archive. With ‘Les Choses Perdues', the aim is to prompt thinking about the continuum. Represented in the exhibition is one artist whose pioneering practice rose to prominence during that original wave considering ‘the image' and its (inter)relationships and discourses, two younger painters reaching a certain maturity during the more recent ‘archive era' and, significantly, two painters gaining recognition in that strange cusp; the years in between. In other words, we can consider a snapshot of three ‘generations' of artists intrinsically — though not always exclusively- deploying painting as a means of conceptually engaging with ‘the image' and/or ‘the archive' as a coordinate for contemporary painting. Furthermore, selection and inclusion is hardly broad: there is no painter in the exhibition that works with randomness, even if it sometimes appears so. All of the painters in ‘Les Choses Perdues' are notable for distilling very particular images into their work. What may at first seem random never remains so, even if a certain enigma or level of opacity as to their intended meaning/s is equally present. Furthermore, as also becomes apparent, this work can never be readily taken as simply ‘representational'. Within the choices of images emerging in the paintings themselves, there is almost certainly something indicating a dislocation of time. The paintings before us, through different means, conjure up a visual language expressed in the past tense; a discourse in the present that makes necessary reference to the past. It's there in the art historic references and quotes. It's there in something hovering between an ambivalent nostalgia and a critique of the past or present. Naturally, it's there, implicitly, in the decision to paint. And yet, it is never once reactionary.