NICOLAS TOURON ”EVERYDAY ADVENTURES”

Nicolas Touron (*1970) was born in France and studied sculpture and audiovisual media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 2001 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, and since 2002 he has been living and working in New York, graduating with an MFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in 2003. The exhibition Everyday Adventures is the first presentation of his work in Germany. Accompanied by drawings dating from 2004-5, Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer is showing a new installation entitled Up, up and Away.

Touron works in the media of drawing, sculpture and video. In his drawings and installations alike, he creates microcosmic worlds rich in detail, quirky, as imaginative as they are disturbing, in which he has disparate spheres interpenetrate with their assorted populations, be they from nature (tree stumps or slats; animals – elephants, pigs, dragons, camels, stags and beavers) or the world of transport (cars, aeroplanes, helicopters, lorries) or arms (cannon, missiles, targets, launching pads); representatives of the world of commodities occur – Scotch-Brite or Heinz Tomato Ketchup. The greater order into which they are set choreographs them, drawings, installations and all, as a military manoeuvre. The individual object only rarely features autonomously, but frequently as ‘troops’ or a mass and the dynamic impulse is linear and focused; often, with two directional forces literally at loggerheads. Crashes, destruction and disintegration are constant factors. The foils of ‘battle zone’ and ‘playground’ are welded into one shot-silk image. There is a constant among the figures also: a green hart, the animal familiar as a symbol since pre-Christian times, struts like a lone protagonist through Utopian landscapes.

In the current exhibition some fifteen drawings in landscape format are on view, ranging in size from 48 x 61 to 63 x 100 cm. They have been completed with roller pens and felt markers, including metallic inks, with brown, pink, silver and black predominating and complemented by glowing red, green and blue highlights. The line is highly attenuated and filigree, recalling comic or children’s book illustration. The viewer is given the impression that these works, though composed with deliberation and reinforced with assertive diagonal and vertical composition lines, are a product of light, flowing lines and are at some points extendable in to infinity. Wealth of detail and figurative depiction coax one into deciphering hidden narratives. Between the cool detachment and the fairy-tale lyricism, unexpected developments gradually come to light. On the way, the artist operates with alienation effects in form, material, colour and proportions.

For him, the drawings are a kind of development pool and a preliminary stage for potential realisation in his installations. In the 150 x 300 cm – piece, Up, up and Away, he has used ceramics, synthetic resin, ready-made products, light and sound to constitute a bizarre scene. Beavers of white glazed ceramic, an ‘engine unit’ buckled to their backs, are positioned round a ceramic truck with loading platform raised and blinking. One of the animals is all set to take off while two others have already ‘made it’ – stuck head-first in the ground. At a further radius from events at centre-stage, there are dabs of brightly-coloured icing, miniature spoons and miniature graters, swans with arched necks, amorphous accretions, ‘Scotch-Brite’ cartons and inscribed panels. We are witness to a secret ceremony the significance of which remains obscure. The startling truth to the object imposes a sense of realism about the scene at the same time as the suggestion of miniature worlds of play gives just scope to the role of fiction.

In Nicolas Touron’s works the role played by physical processes of transformation is fundamental. Hard objects become soft, animals and cars melt, run apart, wide. Gaseous elements escape from containers and spread, overwhelming the compositional order. Scattered particles contrast with blocks of masses, aircraft plunge into stags or catch on tree stumps; this interpenetration of form in the picture’s objects also implies their mutual entanglement on the semantic level. Independently of an implicit critique of aspects such as gene technology, the market economy and a nature-industry antagonism, Touron’s work demonstrates above all that we live in a world of simulation where the reliability of an unambiguous set of rules has long ceded to the grand party game with its arbitrary, lightning changes of strategy – we are the inhabitants of a ‘battle zone’ with unlimited liberties. It is also a location where the title sheds all that may seem paradox in allowing in the day-to-day for the aspect of the extraordinary that is inherent in adventure.

Gabriele Wurzel

The Private View is on Wednesday, February 15, 2006, 6 pm – 9 pm.
Exhibition to March 24, 2006

The Gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 1 pm – 7 pm, Saturday 12 noon – 4 pm; and by appointment