Wilson Tarbox

Wilson Tarbox is an Art Historian, Critic and writer based in Paris, France.

All in Reviews

9 Shows to See during Art Brussels Week

Jun 4

Jun 4 9 Shows to See during Art Brussels Week

Reviews, Art Market

Slowly but surely, life in European cities is returning to normal. Masks are still ubiquitous features of daily life, but since the middle of May, bars, restaurants, museums, and art galleries have opened again to a public eager to reconnect with social and cultural life. The easing of COVID-19 restrictions has come at a perfect time for art lovers. From June 3rd through 6th (and through June 14th online on Artsy), Brussels, Antwerp, the coastal Belgian town of Knokke, and Paris will host a very special edition of Art Brussels, reformatted and renamed as Art Brussels Week 2021.

Wu Tsang’s Renewal of the Collective

Jan 19

Jan 19 Wu Tsang’s Renewal of the Collective

In the second volume of his Prison Notebooks (1926), Italian communist Antonio Gramsci suggests that critical consciousness stems from the understanding that one’s identity is shaped by historical processes ‘which [have] deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The notion of an infinitely mutable mosaic of identities that we carry with ourselves (class, gender and race) is at the heart of ‘Visionary Company’, the exhibition by filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang and her multidisciplinary collective Moved by Motion, currently at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.

Street art. Le pochoir couché sur papier

Dec 21

Dec 21 Street art. Le pochoir couché sur papier

Reviews, Book Review

Si le street art nous paraît aujourd’hui lié à une certaine modernité urbaine, ses origines remontent en réalité à l’art néolithique, comme nous le rappelle une photographie de la main en négatif sur le mur de la grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc. Cette photo ne représente qu’un des aspects du portrait que Christian Guémy, alias C215, dresse du pochoir. Son Manuel du pochoir retrace l’histoire de cet art, sans doute l’outil le plus utilisé dans la réalisation d’une œuvre de street art, après la bombe de peinture. Dans cette histoire originelle se mêlent l’expérience personnelle et un grand savoir-faire technique qui découle d’une vie passée à peindre les murs du monde entier. Mais la biographie de C215 n’est que suggérée ici et là par le Manuel, qui se concentre plutôt sur des explications synthétiques mais complètes de la multitude d’aspects propres à la peinture au pochoir. Loin d’être un outil simplifiant la peinture jusqu’à la transformer en geste mécanique, il s’agit d’un instrument qui démultiplie les possibilités du rendu de l’image. L’ouvrage évoque les liens entre la peinture au pochoir et d’autres techniques artistiques à l’instar de l’estampe et la photographie. Afin d’exposer pleinement la multiplicité d’usages que cette méthode, l’ouvrage insère des entretiens avec 17 différents street artistes. Au total, il reste accessible tout en étant didactique.

5 Must-See Shows from Paris Gallery Weekend

Jul 7

Jul 7 5 Must-See Shows from Paris Gallery Weekend

Reviews, Art Market

The seventh edition of Paris Gallery Weekend took place this past weekend, a month and a half later than in previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixty participating galleries presenting 72 exhibitions are spread across four neighborhoods or, one could say, three temporalities. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Marais, the 8th arrondissement, and Pantin-Romainville symbolically represent the past, present, and future of the Parisian art market.

L’affiche cubaine, une arme de lutte

Apr 19

Apr 19 L’affiche cubaine, une arme de lutte

L’art dit « socialiste » est pour beaucoup synonyme de propagande, sans réel intérêt esthétique. L’exposition Affiches cubaines, révolution et cinéma, 1959-2019 au Musée d’arts décoratifs (MAD) à Paris, en présente au contraire un tout autre genre : coloré, exubérant et surtout ouvert à diverses influences provenant de l’art contemporain mondial, telles le pop, le psychédélisme ou l’art optique (op’ art) et cinétique.

Luiz Roque’s Films Pay Tribute to Marginalized Subcultures

Apr 15

Apr 15 Luiz Roque’s Films Pay Tribute to Marginalized Subcultures

The six short films, two photographs and a sculptural installation in Luiz Roque’s solo show at Passerelle – Centre d’art contemporain offer a snapshot of the artist’s 20-year career. Eschewing strict chronological order, the works in ‘República’ speak to the artist’s persistent engagement with both global and local issues through his weaving of gender, race, class politics, ecology, modernism and science fiction into sensuous fragmentary, filmic narratives.

La XVIe biennale d’Istanbul, écologie ou barbarie ?

Nov 8

Nov 8 La XVIe biennale d’Istanbul, écologie ou barbarie ?

ISTANBUL—Sur ce qui paraît être une chaîne d’information en continu, nous voyons l’arrivée d’un cortège officiel d’automobiles à l’entrée d’un palais présidentiel. La porte de l’une des limousines noires s’ouvre et en émerge un sac-poubelle, de la taille d’un homme. Le sac-poubelle et le Président s’étreignent avant d’entrer dans le palais. Dans la prochaine scène, les deux apparaissent derrière deux pupitres identiques lors d’une conférence de presse où les flashes des caméras les illuminent et les journalistes vocifèrent pour leur poser des questions. Ensuite, nous voyons le sac-poubelle s’adresser aux Nations Unies, avant que la caméra ne passe enfin sur une masse de plastique, de la taille d’un continent, flottant dans l’océan.

What Does It Mean to Be European?

Jun 17

Jun 17 What Does It Mean to Be European?

Europe is in crisis. Right-wing populisms are on the rise and have been for some time now. As the European Union’s once triumphant liberal hegemony sputters under the weight of its own contradictions, politicians such as Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini have seized on a generalized feeling of precariousness to address a more libidinal obsession with national identity, defined in opposition to the non-European other.

Geometric Dreams from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego

Mar 25

Mar 25 Geometric Dreams from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego

‘I have dreamed geometry / I have dreamed the point, the line, the plane, and the volume / I have dreamed yellow, blue and red.’ These lines from Jorge Luis Borges’s poem ‘Descartes’ (1981) are found on the opening page of the catalogue to ‘Géométries sud, du Mexique à la Terre de feu’ (Southern Geometries, from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego). A fitting epigraph, they announce the vertiginous profusion of coloured shapes in the nearly 250 works by more than 70 artists and creators from the pre-Columbian period to the present.

Mar 7

Mar 7 Stone Fruit and Paper Insects: Erika Verzutti’s Play with the Soft and the Hard

The first work that the visitor encounters upon entering the exhibition is Opening with rain (2018), which looks, at first glance, like a large slab of stone. It's actually painted papier maché, with traces of colorful paint – blood-orange, fluorescent yellow and deep turquoise – set into recessed spaces that appear as zoomorphic hieroglyphs, describing something between insect and totem. These markings radiate out from a stone egg suspended within a crater in the lower half of the composition.

DAU’s Totalitarian Reality Show: Artwork of the Century or Stalinist Cosplay?

Feb 8

Feb 8 DAU’s Totalitarian Reality Show: Artwork of the Century or Stalinist Cosplay?

It is more than a film but not exactly an exhibition. Not quite theatre or performance, although elements of both are omnipresent. It has Mongolian shamans, Russian orthodox priests, rabbis, imams and psychoanalysts, if you need to vent. There are meticulously detailed recreations of Soviet-era apartments inhabited by people who only speak Russian. Eminent performance artist Marina Abramović is supposed to make an appearance. (She is one of the project’s many celebrity ‘ambassadors’ who also include physicists and mathematicians Carlo Rovelli and Dimitri Kaledin, theatre directors Peter Sellars and Romeo Castellucci, artists Carsten Höller and Philippe Parreno and the designer Rei Kawakubo, among others.) And, for one euro, a stony-faced barman will serve you watery coffee or a litre of beer. It is DAU, the multimedia art ‘experience’-cum-independent Soviet state that is being hailed by its creators as the art-event of the century and by the French press as a disastrous flop.

Tomás Saraceno: How Spiders Build their Webs

Jan 21

Jan 21 Tomás Saraceno: How Spiders Build their Webs

For the fourth iteration of the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘Carte Blanche’ series – where a single artist is invited to transform the entirety of the Paris museum’s cavernous 13,000 m2 exhibition space – Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno has conceived a massive black and white parcours. His installations encourage visitors to reflect on their place within the infinitely complex networks that structure our existence, from the minutiae of dust particles and the vibrations of spiderwebs to the collisions of galaxies in the universe. In so doing, the exhibition, which is titled ‘On Air’, explicitly situates itself within the ecologically conscientious conversations around climate change and humanity’s changing relationship to nature in the age of the Anthropocene.

Cooper Jacoby explore les souvenirs d’enfance et la critique sociale

Nov 28

Nov 28 Cooper Jacoby explore les souvenirs d’enfance et la critique sociale

PARIS—La première chose que constate le visiteur de l’exposition Cooper Jacoby, Susceptibles sont les sculptures de couleurs vives—bleu ciel, orange et jaune fluorescents. Elles se dégagent de la blancheur aveuglante des salles de High Art, galerie située au rez-de-chaussée de l’immeuble où Georges Bizet a commencé à composer l’opéra Carmen. Entouré par des lambris blanchis du XIXe siècle, les œuvres de Cooper Jacoby, jeune artiste américain, font allusion aux espaces du quotidien, intérieurs et extérieurs, privés et publics.

Between Two Senses: Franz West's Invitation To Look And Touch

Sep 26

Sep 26 Between Two Senses: Franz West's Invitation To Look And Touch

A retrospective of Austrian artist Franz West at the Centre Pompidou in Paris begins where most biographical tales perhaps should – with his mother, Emilie West. Born to a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she espoused communist ideals and the artist’s father, Ferdinand Zokan, a Serbian coal merchant. The family lived in a public housing complex, out of which Emilie ran a private dental practice. Her clients included many artists and poets, among them Reinhard Priessnitz, a poet and theorist who would give the name Paßstücke (Adaptives) to West’s most iconic series of sculptures. This early contact with Vienna’s artistic milieu would have a profound impact on the young West’s later career, as would the sounds of whirling drills and the image of his mother creating white and pink moulds of teeth from plaster and resin.

An Art School Started by Marc Chagall that Became a Modernist Wasteland

Jul 11

Jul 11 An Art School Started by Marc Chagall that Became a Modernist Wasteland

The Centre Pompidou examines the thrilling but lesser-known story of the People’s Art School, founded in 1918 by the painter Marc Chagall in his hometown of Vitebsk.

Más allá del muralismo

Jan 15

Jan 15 Más allá del muralismo

El arte mexicano de la primera mitad del siglo XX es un territorio ampliamente explorado, pero su historia ha permanecido durante mucho tiempo eclipsada detrás de cuatro figuras: los tres grandes del muralismo –Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros y José Clemente Orozco– y, desde los años ochenta, Frida Kahlo. La exposición que se abrió en octubre en el Grand Palais en París, Mexique 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco et les avant-gardes, parece confirmar desde el título ese predominio. Aunque por un lado no se puede contar la historia del arte moderno en México sin apelar a algunos nombres demasiado conocidos, habría sido un error reducirlo a ellos. La muestra de París es un intento tímido pero necesario para ampliar esa mirada.

Apollinaire, the Immigrant Poet Who Shaped the Parisian Avant-Garde

Jul 13

Jul 13 Apollinaire, the Immigrant Poet Who Shaped the Parisian Avant-Garde

PARIS — On September 7, 1911, French police arrested poet Guillame Apollinaire for stealing the Mona Lisa. Apollinaire hadn’t actually taken the iconic treasure; however, a few days prior to his arrest, he had attempted to anonymously return a pair of ancient Iberian busts stolen for him and Pablo Picasso by their associate, Géry Piéret. Picasso, who modeled the central figures of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” on the bust Piéret procured for him, was also brought in for questioning. Miraculously, neither the painter nor the poet was charged with receiving stolen goods. If they had been, their status as foreigners in the French Republic would most certainly have resulted in their deportation. Luckily, lack of evidence and pressure from the Parisian art and literary establishments forced the police to release Apollinaire six days later — thereby consigning the episode to one of the wilder footnotes of art history rather than to one of its major chapters.

A Monumental Critique of Empire, from Napoleonic to Corporate Times

May 23

May 23 A Monumental Critique of Empire, from Napoleonic to Corporate Times

PARIS — Scattered throughout the cavernous nave of the Grand Palais are mountains of shipping containers. Green, blue, and brown, corporate logos and serial numbers stamped on their sides, they reach up to the resplendent glass ceiling of the Palais, like mounds of oversized Legos.