I agree… No! … I disagree. 2011
oil on canvas, 24 cm x 30 cm

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B2H2AMX (LOFIVERSION). 2007
oil on canvas, 30 cm x 40 cm

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Rain on lens. 2011
oil on canvas, 30 cm x 40 cm

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KLING KLONG. 2010
oil on canvas, 26 cm x 34 cm

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Palace. 2010
oil on canvas, 140 cm x 190 cm

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Luebeck. 2009
oil on canvas, 130 cm x 170 cm

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Swathed in a crepuscular atmosphere, French painter and video artist DAMIEN CADIO’s creatures and ghostly scenarios are captured in the middle of arcane narratives.

His paintings (often small formats) depict a mysterious, intimate atmosphere and conjure up an unusual universe that is as enticing as it is disquieting. The strangeness emanating from the paintings is transcended by the frequent use of fluorescent colours and very distinctive light.

The subjects of CADIO’s pieces are enigmatic and occasionally even difficult to distinguish. He paints from images he finds on the Net, lifts out of books or magazines, or steals from films, and then created distance from the images by cropping them.

DAMIEN CADIO was born in France but now lives and works in Berlin. You can view more of DAMIEN‘s work on his website right here: http://damiencadio.com/

Untitled, 2010
C-print on aluminium
62 x 78 cm

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Untitled, 2008
C-print on aluminium
100 x 128 cm / 74 x 94 cm / 45 x 58 cm

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Rainy Silence. 2007
C-print on aluminium
74 x 94 cm / 45 x 58 cm

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Untitled, 2009
C-print on aluminium
100 x 128 cm / 74 x 94 cm / 45 x 58 cm

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Untitled (dos), 2009
C-print on aluminium
100×128 cm / 74 x 94 cm / 45×58

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Untitled, 2007
C-print on aluminium
100 x 128 cm / 74 x 94 cm / 45 x 58 cm

all images Courtesy les Filles Du Calvaire

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LAURA HENNO is a French photographer whose work primarily explores teenagers or very young people lost in their musings or suddenly immobilised by something out of our perception. In fact each photograph is carefully staged and generates its own fictional space both tangible and intangible.

The notions of uncertainty and doubt predominate in my work. There’s always something indiscernible, which hovers over my characters. The young people I photograph appear as characters from a narrative but we will never know anything about their history, about what they’re looking at or what they’re looking for. My photographs are reminiscent of different codes like film or painting, which also contributes to the feeling of ‘in between’ that characterizes my work.

I think the way I work is similar to a film director.First I imagine a picture and then I draw it. I study the construction of the picture before working with my camera. I often have a precise idea of the atmosphere I want, which I try to achieve working solely with natural light. Each picture is built little by little as I look first for the place and then the people I want to photograph. Sometimes I work with people I know and sometimes I cast my ‘characters’ in the street. – LAURA HENNO for Wallpaper in 2007

She lives and works in Lille. After studying photography at the National School of Visual Arts of La Cambre in Brussels, she joined the National Studio of Contemporary Arts Fresnoy to continue his photographic work there and made his first short film in 2003. She also works in the artists’ collective Qubo Gas. In 2007, she received the Discovery Award Rencontres d’Arles.

And good news: her book entitled Summer Crossing is available at Filigranes Editions

Looking Up, 2011
installation at the Toronto Pearson International Airport, Terminal 1, International Departures

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Canadian designer BRUCE MAU is particularly famous for being the co-author of S,M,L,XL (in collaboration with REM KOOLHAAS), a compilation of essays, diary excerpts, travelogues, photographs, architectural plans, sketches, cartoons produced by O.M.A. in the past twenty years. MAU has since left his Toronto Studio and has devoted himself to “Massive Change Network”, a cultural theory project on the subject of design and design thinking.

One of his latest project is a 400-square-foot installation at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport entitled Looking Up. The photos, printed on translucent paper, are being arrayed in a rectangular grid on the south-facing windows of the international departures area (you need to be leaving the country to see it). It is an ongoing series of several hundred images of light in dynamic interaction with our changing atmosphere, as seen from BRUCE MAU‘s home near Lake Michigan and around the world.

Several years ago I began photographing the sky. This work came first out of my experience of seemingly constant travel. Time after time, my flight would disappear into the clouds and emerge into the brilliant light beyond. Each image at first appears as a simple, almost artifical gradient or flat color. On closer inspection, each surface reveals the dynamic volume and sublte complexity of the natural environment. Occasionally, there are clues that what you are looking at is real. – BRUCE MAU

Read more about this project here

from the series Blissed Photos, 2006
© KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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from the series Finally Photos, 2007
61cm x 100cm © KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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from the series Finally Photos, 2007
61cm x 100cm © KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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from the series Finally Photos, 2007
61cm x 100cm © KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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from the series Istanbul, 2002
© KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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from the series Istanbul, 2002
© KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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Poster for the 60th Festival internazionale del film Locarno – Play-Forward / Installation (2007) using a picture from the series Psychasthenia 10

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from the series Psychasthenia, 2000
125cm x 189cm. © KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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Oblique, 2008
installation view at Manifesta 7 © KNUT ÅSDAM Studio

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Norwegian KNUT ÅSDAM produces films and video installations that explore the politics and poetics of architecture, space and community. Youth culture, politics, linguistic psychology, music and everyday life are some of the coordinates in ÅSDAM‘s network of complex urban narratives.

KNUT ÅSDAM currently lives and works in Oslo. He has exhibited at Tate Britain; Manifesta; the Istanbul Biennial; the Venice Biennale; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; P.S.1, New York; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including Bergen Kunsthall (2010); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2007); the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2006); and Kunsthalle Bern (2005).

Make sure to check out his architectural installations: it is here that ÅSDAM’s interest in the experience of people in public and private spaces takes root, which he later carries into his film work.

all works from the series Ruins (Season 1), 2010
© RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA

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Ten things you need to know about French photographer RAPHAËL DALLAPORTA and his project Ruins (season 1):

1. He lives and works in Paris, where he graduated from the Ecole des Gobelins in 2002
2. In 2004 he was selected by MARTIN PARR to exhibit for the first time his series Antipersonnel 1:1 at the Arles Photography Festival
3. He is the winner of the 2010 Young Photographer ICP Infinity Award
4. And he received the Foam Paul Huf Award earlier this year
5. His work combines involvement with a highly analytical approach to social perversities. His uncompromising, conceptual and extremely creative approach mark him as an authentic artist who stands out in the young generation of photographers – FRANÇOIS HÉBEL
   
6. Since last autumn, he has been working with a team of archaeologists from the north of Afghanistan
7. Using an aerial camera system – a special drone (a small remote-controlled helicopter) – adapted by DALLAPORTA for the project, he has been able to fly over Afghanistan taking pictures of the sites
8. The shooting process is automated and the areas photographed are reconstructed by means of a powerful image-recognition algorithm
9. In combination, these images form a single large aerial picture that also shows traces of ancient civilisations: past and present come together in this series of almost scientific photos
10. And good news: this seried untitled Ruins (season 1) will be presented exclusively for the Rencontres d’Arles Discovery Award

Girl with Flower Shirt
C-print, 1987

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girl, blue shirt
C-print, 1987

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woman black shirt
C-print, 1988

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smiling women
C-print, 1987

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Portrait (Isabelle Graw)
C-print, 1988

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In the early 1980s, while German photographer THOMAS RUFF was studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the photography class of Bernd Becher, he started to work on his series of portrait photographs of artists and friends from the Dusseldorf art and music scene, initially in small formats and later, from the mid-1980s onwards, as large scale color photographs. And it is with this work that he emerged on the international scene.

When I started with the portraits, it was with an awareness that we were living at the end of the twentieth century, in an industrialized Western country. We weren’t living by candlelight in caves anymore. We were in surroundings where everything was brightly illuminated—even our parking garages. Surveillance cameras were everywhere, and you were being watched all the time. When I started making the portraits in 1981, my friends and I were very curious about what might happen in 1984, ORWELL’s year.

My idea for the portraits was to use a very even light in combination with a large-format camera, so that you could see everything about the sitter’s face. I didn’t want to hide anything. Yet I also didn’t want the people I portrayed to show any emotion. I told them to look into the camera with self-confidence, but likewise, that they should be conscious of the fact that they were being photographed, that they were looking into a camera.

I wanted to do a kind of official portrait of my generation. I wanted the photographs to look like those in passports, but without any other information, such as the subject’s address, religion, profession, or prior convictions. I didn’t want the police/viewer to get any information about us. They shouldn’t be able to know what we felt at that moment, whether we were happy or sad. – THOMAS RUFF in conversation with GIL BLANK for Influence magazine, Issue 2, 2004

Untitled 13, 2004-2008 from the series Quelle heure est-elle ?

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Untitled 29, 2004-2008 from the series Quelle heure est-elle ?

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Untitled 25, 2004-2008 from the series Quelle heure est-elle ?

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Untitled 140, 2004-2008 from the series Passengers

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Untitled 191, 2004-2008 from the series Passengers

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Untitled 188, 2004-2008 from the series Passengers

all pictures © CHRIS MARKER

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CHRIS MARKER captured, between 2008 and 2010, black and white images of commuters on the train without their knowledge, catching them in those fleeting moments of intimacy and alienation on the Paris Métro (cf. the series Quelle heure est-elle?). In order to capture his subjects “truer to their inner selves,” he explains, he used a digital wristwatch camera. Although he later used different contraptions, the title remained, reminding that the stolen moment of a woman’s face tells something about Time itself. The same idea is developed in the series Passengers (his first series in color).

French photographer and filmmaker, CHRIS MARKER (b.1921) is best known for his conceptual films Sans Soleil and La jetée (1962), a 29 minute film created almost entirely with still images which inspired DAVID and JANET PEOPLES to write the screenplay for 12 Monkeys.

And good news: Quelle heure est-elle? has been exhibited in 2009 at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York, and is also as part of the large CHRIS MARKER‘s retrospective featured in Arles this year (from July 4th through September 2011 in the Palais de l’Archevêché).

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found via La Lettre de la Photographie

Bullet Hole. 2005
Silkscreen on aluminium. 71 x  95 cm
Courtesy of NATE LOWMAN and Edward Mitterrand Gallery

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They’re just magnets that you put on your car. I just was really into them. A lot of my art is about violence and crime. I also really like shaped canvases. I’ve always loved ELLSWORTH KELLY, I love all the Brazilians, the Neo concrete People like LYGIA CLARK. I always wanted to make these shaped canvas objects but I didn’t want to make a BLINKY PALERMO with jagged edges; I wanted to make something else. The bullet holes were a good opportunity to have the cultural things that I’m interested in come together with that. It was an experiment to see how you can get pretty… It’s like all modern art, it’s really insane to make, and it’s kinda pretty and it’s really involved. There’s all this stuff. It’s not just like another Xerox or another thing I was using. It was a step in a different direction. I still wanted it to be about stuff, not just be like “this looks like art and it’s on the wall” I wanted it to have content. – NATE LOWMAN for Bad Day Magazine, 2009

all works:
Untitled, 2009. 19,7 x 21 cm
Epson DURABrite inkjet on book page
Images courtesy of Gio Marconi, Milan

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WADE GUYTON‘s “printer drawings” consist of illustrated pages torn out of exhibition catalogues, monographs and architecture books (for this particular series of works presented above, GUYTON tore images from an Italian lamp catalogue from the 1960s). With the help of a home-office ink jet printer, WADE GUYTON then adds geometric shapes to the original to create what the artist refers to as “drawings”.

Combined with photography, printmaking can provide rich surfaces and new options of manipulation that will shift meaning and presence, while providing a unity of surface.

This series is presented in a solo exhibition entitled Couleur et Fabrication at Gió Marconi in Milano until 22 July, 2011

Stay on WFW and read more about this artist

Bees 019-01

Body/Wound 009, Body/Wound 007, Girlfriend (self-portrait) 035
all from the series The Bearable

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Bees 010-02

Body/Wound 024, Bees 005-01, Body/Wound Happy “Birthday”

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Bees 057-05

all images © ZHE CHEN

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Chinese photographer ZHE CHEN has been documenting in the past four years her self-inflicted activities of her own and others. The result is two moving and uncomfortable photo essays:

Bees records a marginalized group of people in China, who, faced with chaos, violence, alienation and irredeemable loss in life, feel propelled to leave physical traces and markings on their bodies. And The Bearable (2010), a photo series documenting her own self-inflictions over the past 4 years.

I hope my photographs inquire upon society’s prejudice and preconception towards this community, and not become illustrations or pictorial evidence for the topic at hand: every subject is an individual, not just ‘one of them’ – his or her life cannot be predicted or dictated by any constructed social code or notion. Depression plants the seed of introspection. The bees take it in; They reason it, embrace it and explore it, forming an isolated universe in their own minds. These self-sustained universes contain every reason that explains the ‘abnormality’ that no one who lacks in common experiences could decode. I hope a first glance of my work conveys the idea of secrecy and sentiments, under which lies information awaiting exposure and recognition: like an index page pointing towards all the unanswered questions.

In a sense, just as DELEUZE once stated, “Making art becomes a process of healing.”

ZHE CHEN is currently living in Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Photography & Imaging from the Art Center College of Design, CA. This year, she won the Three Shadows Photography Award (2011) and was finalist for the Burn/Magnum Emerging Photographer Grant (2011).

Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery), 2010

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Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery)
installation view at Giò Marconi, 2011
except the last picture: Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery) at Manifesta 8 (Murcia)

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Frozen, 2010
excavation sites, sign boards, maps, mixed media
installation view at Frieze Art Fair, London, 2010

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Desk Job, 2009
The Collectors, Nordic Pavillion, 53rd Venice Biennale

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SIMON FUJIWARA’s Clapham studio, south London
photo © GAUTIER DEBLONDE

all works and images courtesy of the artist

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SIMON FUJIWARA is a storyteller: through novels, theatre plays, lectures and installations, SIMON FUJIWARA writes scripts and performs his own real-life biography as fiction -a drama in which he plays multiple characters including historian, playwright, novelist, anthropologist and eroticist – which question the possibility of manipulating history and affecting collective memory through individual experience.

“I keep coming back to moments in the past where there is little or no information, where even academic theses have to rely on assumptions and leaps of faith, as it gives me more freedom to manipulate the material into a story I want to tell”

His installation “Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery) (2010),” for example tells the true story of the discovery of a giant, ancient stone phallus beneath the foundations of a new museum building, somewhere in the Arabian Desert. No records of its existence or disappearance exist. Some say it was destroyed, others saw an unlabelled crate departing for an unknown destination. The truth is in the hands of four British men who were working on the museum’s construction site. However, when FUJIWARA commissioned them to re-fabricate the phallus as they remembered it, arguments ensued. One witness remembers testicles, another claims it was simply a column. Some say it was three meters long, others eight. Size is not the question here—it is the shape that counts.

Born in Japan to a British dancer mother and a Japanese architect father, SIMON FUJIWARA studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, then spent time at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and became an artist. He lives and works between Berlin and London. In 2011 he won the South Bank Arts Awards, as emerging visual artist. In 2010 he won the Baloise Art Prize, for Art Basel 41 and the Cartier Award for Frieze Art Fair.

Standard [square + sine version]. 2005

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NICOLAS MAIGRET’s work certainly isn’t going to everyone’s cup of tea but my tastes run wide and I’m sure yours too. In fact, NICOLAS MAIGRET has been developing an experimental practice of sound and electronic images (performances, installations, programming, radio) since 2001.

In his creations he experiments the possibilities of contemporary technologies to auto-generate aesthetic forms, sound or visual languages and specific behaviors. His work is as well a micro-laboratory as a point of view on the technological tools and there influences on our way of thinking and of acting. He works in duo with NICOLAS MONTGERMONT under the name of ART OF FAILURE.

One of their latest project is an online and autonomous networked audio project. It consists of an audio stream traveling through the world wide web since the 1st july 2010 and that you can hear live: http://laps.artoffailure.org/

For Standard, NICOLAS MAIGRET used the compression of digital data to create its own visual and sound language. The RVB flickers are compressed in the lowest .WMV quality over and over.

Truly fascinating and innovative projects!

from the monograph Oaint (2010), page 46

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Chad Ochocinco, Installation View at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY. 2011

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Chad Ochocinco, Installation View at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY. 2011

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Chad Ochocinco, Installation View at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY. 2011

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from the monograph Oaint (2010), page 23

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Chad Ochocinco, Installation View at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY. 2011

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Chad Ochocinco, Installation View at Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY. 2011

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from the monograph Oaint (2010), page 21

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Eight things you need to know about DARREN BADER:

1. He is what we call a multidisciplinary artist with a strange unplaceable body of work
2. He is also a writer
3. His first book, James Earl Scones (2005), opens with a letter addressed to TOM CRUISE and NASA
4. His second book entitled Pulturebook (B&W version, 2008) is a kind of anti-novel filled with quotes
5. His newest publication Oaint (2010)  is a visual adventure conceived according to two criteria: that the left and right background images have to look good together and secondly, the images put on top follow the law of chronology (because it was conceived as a survey of his work)
6. In 2010 he has been included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1.
7. His latest solo exhibition was Chad Ochocinco at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York (2011)
8. He lives in New York

Flesh Space. 2011
static brush, gesture/modulation practice

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The Faceless (detail of Composition #23)
detail of a gesture-modulated video-feedback painting
composited and enlarged using “Bicubic”, Image Interpolation in Adobe Photoshop

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Compositions #9-#18
gesture-modulated video-feedback
painting archival inkjet print

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Taxonomy of Strokes on Black
gesture-modulated video-feedback
painting archival inkjet print

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Taxonomy of Strokes on Black (detail)
gesture-modulated video-feedback
painting archival inkjet print

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Taxonomy of Strokes on Black (detail)
gesture-modulated video-feedback
painting archival inkjet print

all works © TYSON PARKS
images 2,3,4,5 & 6 from Novembre Magazine Issue 3

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Montréal-based artist TYSON PARKS creates digital paintings using a combination of computer hardware and software that he’s designed, a setup he has appropriated from his practice as an electronic music producer, computer programmer, and video artist. He re-imagines the brush, the paint, the canvas:

“My work is a revisitation of non-objective painting philosophies, such as those by WASSILY KANDINSKY, who published formal theories on affinities between painting and music. He wrote about abstract painting in relation to music that likened visual elements of line, color, and shape to musical elements of timbre, pitch, amplitude, and orchestration.  Both in respect for, and as a critique of, these interesting but dated theories, I have approached the canvas as a space to inject new visual aesthetics based upon my understanding of contemporary music and composition theory, as well as my practice as a contemporary electronic music producer. Experimentation with materials is important for me. In this case, I experimented with the possibilities of programming my own software and physical interface for digital painting.  Through this process of re-inventing the digital paintbrush and digital canvas for myself, I have found myself appropriating many ideas from my music composition process. While exploring the potential of the new tools I’ve created, I’ve found myself fascinated by the simple act and visual result of creating a single stroke. – TYSON PARKS for art:21