BEHIND THE SCENES:
ESTHER SHALEV-GERZ
SUMMER IN PARIS

PART I

I have been working with ESG since starting JSVCprojects in 2013. Was grateful to be introduced to the artist and the work by then Sprengel Museum Director Ulrich Krempel with whom she had worked for many years on projects. He insited I come to the opening of her important retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in 2011. Being very blinkered at that time by the role and responsibilities I had for the artists of Ropac Gallery where I was then a partner, I probably said in a cavaliere way to him, you must be kidding, I don’t have time to come to an opening of an artist I don’t know and don’t represent. Which made him more adamant.

It was a funny evening. I was in the process of divorcing and had moved for this reason from the small loft I had on rue Amelot for several years, to a small place near Place des Vosges. Was in such a tizzy that night for many reasons not worth this space now, that going out the door I left the key inside. A Freudian therapist would have a field day with this, but it meant I was late for the opening and in a highly emotional adrenaline state when I did get to meet the artist finally. Elegantly I was included in the dinner.

Hopefully some among you have also had the pleasure of seeing that exhibition made with the wonderful director, Marta Gili, or the one ESG made in the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne with curator Nicole Schweizer, two years later. I reference these large-scale events here because it is essential to have a sense of the vastness of this artist’s work in these last three decades. Many will remember the piece she mounted in 2005 at the Hôtel de Ville of Paris, “Between Listening and Telling: Last Whitnesses, Auschwitz 1945-2005”, with large screens hanging in the central room showing silent interviews with Holocaust survivors. Serpentine tables with computer screens allowed visitors to sit for hours and listen to the transcripts.

PART II

The subject of memory, collective histories, times in between, absence and presence, good and evil, history and its missing pieces, nature and its specific cycles and functions – these are the subjects that infiltrate the art making processes of ESG. Photography in its role as an art, a document, a witness. Video as a way of capturing the quiet moments that escape all of us each and every day. A glance across the crowded Gare de Lyon, for example this morning at all the plywood cladding and scaffolding made me think of the photographs taken for the Crown Letter of “AUCIEL” for example. ESG was noticing a homeless person who has constructed a make shift home incorporating a bench and a small slice of sidewalk.  His encampment was not far from her studio, and she watched the way he changed his camp over the first weeks of the pandemic in late spring 2020.

Talking over dinner this week, I asked about the photos that were going to be up around Paris and especially this seeming enclosed building over a basin with the flowering chestnut trees just off to the right. Signage akimbo, we don’t really know what this is, but this indeterminate temporariness attracts her eye. The places that are built that we walk by without giving them a second glance, along our streets, in our neighbourhoods, parks and highway on ramps. This is an eye for the uncanny and the lost. The places if you were a child and your parents saw you gazing too intensely, they would take you by the hand and say to ski-daddle.

Like all the other unusual, off slightly, pieces of our universe that hold meaning if we only stop and look. But we can’t.  There isn’t time, we are so busy with our phones and our schedules. This is an artist who grabs me, her work is insistent and grabs us back even briefly. Hang on a minute, it says. If you let all of this pass you by what are you left with. What will your life be; thin stone soup my friends. Pause and let your eyes settle on a corner you might walk past. Listen to the voice of someone aged and mussed up incase there is something for you in the silences between their comments.

PART III

Among the important projects of was a permanent work for the campus of the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, a large plaza is now home to a 300 meters in situ sculpture of the shadow of a first growth tree imaginary as one imagines constructed by pavers in the plaza. At the opening the Native Canadian tribal leader made a speech and gave a chant explaining the significance of these first trees and the way his grandfather had taken him into the forest to introduce him to trees as a child. As if they were human beings…

So there have been numerous works in the ESG oeuvre concerning the subject of trees, the life of forests and trees, in Paris this summer you will see this cropped tree trunk with a wrapped image of this Vancouver project like an armband but here it is hugging the bark at eye level offering a kind of genealogical map of its history from long ago, as if somehow all the trees covering the surface of the globe are family, as we humans are. One family. It is a very unusual kind of jewelry or ornament or signage. Made me think of the famous piece from 1967 of Bruce Nauman “Henry Moore Bound to Fail”. Something about a feeling of putting the tree trunk into a restraint of a kind. We don’t know if this is bondage or wrapping or a kind of message about its connection to a sister tree long ago standing tall in the Pacific Northwest of Canada.

I will let you discover the work “After One Year”, photo and text in the photos included.

“Once a year the white domestic paint that will gradually vanish outdoors, was to be refreshed, a layer of this vulnerable surface would accumulate the traces of passage by future visitors.”

It is somehow the red line in the many works of ESG. Things vanish. Somehow traces are left if we only know where and how to look for them.

More info:

Esther Shalev-Gerz

The Crown Letter

News:

“La cité sous le ciel”, CNEAI=, Esther Shalev-Gerz’s work “Inverted Shadow” is part of the exhibition “La cité sous le ciel – 93 artistes”, curated by the CNEAI = at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris.

PHOTO DAYS, The Crown Letter will shown in the middle of Paris on 50 panels on the fence of Square de la Tour Saint-Jacques, 39 rue de Rivoli, 75004 Paris, from 1-22 August 2021 & on the fence of Jardin Villemin, 14 rue des Récollets 75010 Paris, from 1-31 August 2021.