Formerly a technician, it was while pushing crates of equipment and setting up and dismantling stages that Jean Guillaume Panis developed an appetite for concrete, physical artistic practices. For him, labor is art, and the artist is a craftsman who has taken a step aside and pushed the utilitarian into the realm of the sublime.
After an atypical career, he was appointed director of Hangar 107 contemporary art center in Rouen in 2018. There, he exhibits works by Olivier Kosta-Théfaine, Tilt and Tania Mouraud, among others. Each of these artists, in their own way, works around the sign, developing a cryptic style of writing that challenges and forces deciphering.
Writing, trace, name, action – there’s an undeniable reference to graffiti here, but it’s not to be taken literally, but rather as a subterranean spirit. It’s a parent, just like land art or even performance art, which would have taught its offspring to survey, sample, hijack, mark and reinvent the territory.
Based in Normandy, Jean-Guillaume Panis now presents a new space dedicated to artists driven by this same binomial, where action serves as the driving force behind reflection and vice versa. Established as a free zone at the crossroads of practices, the gallery builds its program around visual artists whose work is defined in terms of physical intervention, of setting in motion. The idea is to shed light on a particular aesthetic that stems from a certain conquest of space, far from the closed world of the studio; that of the raw materials, scraps and ready-mades generated by our own societies, and thus bring together artists in direct contact with their environment.