Augustin Katz, William Basinski → Unentitled (study for a room)
Curated by Guillaume Blanc Marianne
Drawing on a transgenerational and transmedial dialogue, this exhibition brings together the young Parisian painter Augustin Katz (born 1995) and the American legend of so-called "accidental" music, William Basinski (born 1958). For both artists, the accidents of memory and its erosion call forth a meditative state in which mental wandering and its haze verge on hallucination.
Their collaboration can be summarized as follows: the first prepared sketches which he sent to the second; the latter responded with an unreleased piece from 1982 that came to mind as he spent time with those paintings — a loop of approximately 40 minutes, introduced and concluded by the long fade-ins and fade-outs that are the composer's signature. Inspired by Augustin Katz's paintings, he titled it Unentitled: unassigned, in a sense, or, in a more radical reading, unqualified, unfounded, illegitimate. According to Basinski, the composition evokes "a moment of intense shock reverberating through time and memory" — but not only that: through its title, it also keeps a watchful eye on the leaders who are currently ransacking the world as though it were merely their private theatre in which to unleash their impulses and indulge their appetite for excess.
Augustin Katz, borrowing from the cinematic format and the theatrical world in Study for a Room, creates a visual echo of Basinski's piece and gives it — almost literally — a stage, or at least a space, in which to disperse its sonic spectrum. His paintings impose an atmosphere in which spectacle becomes ritual, and in which the script of tragedy gives way to the magic of ceremony.
In short: the cohabitation of Study for a Room — an archetypal and magical theatre of humanity and its ghosts — and Unentitled — a despairing contemplation of the madness of the powerful and the powerlessness of their victims — transforms a gallery into a small ballroom, misted with shapeless memories and anonymous revenants, where one may need, at some point, to close one's eyes in order to see more clearly through the thickness of time and its erosion.
Guillaume Blanc Marianne
Augustin Katz
Augustin Katz (born 1995, France — lives and works in Paris) is a painter whose work explores the ways in which images function as structures of thought, shaping perception, memory and the experience of the unconscious. Through a figurative practice marked by distortion and spatial tension, he constructs compositions that operate as mental architectures in which psychic and perceptual states unfold.
His figures appear as the remnants of a narrative that has already taken place, suspended in an uncertain time where matter, memory and perception are in constant transformation. Moving between folklore, religious archetypes, popular imagery, altered bodies and fragments of narration, his paintings act as fixing chambers in which certain images seem to outlast their own disappearance.
William Basinski
William Basinski (b.1958) is a classically trained musician and composer who has been working in experimental media for nearly five decades in NYC and California. Employing obsolete technology and analogue tape loops, his haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic 4-disc masterwork, The Disintegration Loops received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of 2004 by Pitchfork Media. The Temporary Residence deluxe LP box-set reissue from 2012 was awarded best re-issue of the year and a score of 10 on Pitchfork.