Simon Le Ruez: Paris can stay in bed

About

The title of the exhibition is taken from a line in Leo Carax’s 1991 film, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge). With grim radiance, the film charts the story of two fractured individuals discovering each other on Paris’ oldest bridge, upon which themes of abandonment, freedom, desire and redemption are played out with the city as a backdrop. Le Ruez’s new work aligns itself with these multifaceted and fragmented themes. Potent relationships are key to the experience of his work and whilst these may be explored through form, material and structure, a deeper, more complex introspection permanently resides.

Hand blown glass forms permeate the artist’s new work injecting refinement; exquisite digressions and qualities of tension. Like a precarious, revealed interior of communal space within an apartment building, the work Between Brooklyn and the Bronx (2019), hosts a fevered collection of objects and arrangements, which might allude to misfit characters or inhabitants. A hierarchy is at play, with the pinnacle of the piece reserved for a sweeping glass form, which sits there surveying and emanating with all the will and secrecy of a silent concierge. High Holy Days (2019) is a work that takes this sense of refinement further. Two glass forms lay ceremoniously alone on a marble platform, one penetrating the other with a charge of illicit joy. Yet one may wonder if it is a mutual act of celebration or something altogether untoward. Possible conflicting relationships and a sense of brooding are further explored in The Monk (2019), where a bright yet nostalgically coloured structure plays host to, among other things, a muted grey vertical board and a protruding bulbous glass form.

With this exhibition Le Ruez takes the viewer on a celebratory journey full of twists and tangents, crossings and meeting points, conjuring both the immediacy of the here and now and the sense that elsewhere is never far away.

Simon Le Ruez was born in Jersey, UK, in 1970 and currently lives in Sheffield and Berlin. He studied MA Sculpture at Winchester School of Art, Winchester (1994-95) and BA (Hons) Fine Art Sculpture, Kennington School of Art, London (1991-94). Recent exhibitions include ‘Making Ways: Making Our Way’ (video screening, A horizontal fall), Sidney and Matilda Gallery, Sheffield ‘Les flâneurs: Collection Frac Normandie Caen’, 2angles, Flers, France, ‘Translating Travels’, Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh (2018), ‘Vicennial’, Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne, ‘On Drawing’, Lage Egal, Berlin, Germany, ‘Artists’ Books for Everything’, Zentrum für Künstlerpublikationen, Weserburg, Bremen, Germany, ‘Voyage Boxed’, CODEX 2017 International Book Fair, Richmond, California, USA (2017).