GUILLAUME LINARD OSORIO

THE DAY I LOCKED THE LANDSCAPE IN THE WINDOW

OPENING FRIDAY, 05.17.24 | 6 – 8PM | PERFORMANCE 7PM

ON VIEW UNTIL 06.29.24

CARVALHO PARK announces the opening of Paris-based artist, Guillaume Linard Osorio’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, The day I locked the landscape in the window. Interlacing elements of painting, sculpture, performance and the language of architecture, this new body of work questions accepted notions around viewership and the occupation of space – both within and outside of the context of the exhibition. Alongside wall-based works, freestanding structures act as architectural interventions in the gallery, the setting for a collaboration with choreographer Claudia Hilda. A ten-minute performance will be held the evening of the opening at 7PM.

 Painting is largely defined by the act of applying pigment to surface. Distilling the practice to its most essential parts, formal concerns of composition, color, and space are very much present, but Linard Osorio integrates the environment in a manner that most artists do not. Fundamental to their making is the space in which the paintings intend to be situated, the distance or angle by which the viewer will address them, lighting conditions, and spatial arrangements are incorporated into the formal language. As stated by the artist, “A painting on the wall defines a universe framed in a surface. A painting arranged in the middle of a space makes the space around it vibrate.” This principle of vibration, addressed specifically through Linard Osorio’s standing screens, hinges on a discourse around architecture as much as it does painting. Linard Osorio’s work asks the viewer to situate themselves within a built environment, to decide and define distance and space as a matter of navigation – the artwork becomes the choreographer, the viewer is both performer and observer.

Working with polycarbonate most often associated with the commercial installation of glassless windows, Linard Osorio applies familiar architectural materials (along with their own semiotic language) to contemporary dialogues around painting and installation. Familiarity is something with which the artist attempts to imbue his practice, with the specificity of the process balanced by the accessibility of the raw material – they are made from something with which almost any viewer would be intimately familiar, both visually and haptically. This displacement of material imbues the exhibition with an element of the uncanny, the installation feeling at the same time unknown and understood.

Architectural design is intrinsically concerned with the motion of its inhabitants, how space will be occupied and navigated – the work of an architect is problem solving; the anticipation, analysis, and rectification of a space before it is constructed. This new work finds itself within a predefined architectural surrounding, questioning its use and infrastructure simply by its being there. Linard Osorio’s wall-based paintings incorporate light, reflection, and distance into their formal language in the same way as those freestanding – the difference being the way in which the works seek to orient the viewer, and to do so in a way that is both visible and conscious.

Clarity and obscurity are central themes of the exhibition, with works referencing the illusory nature of the screen. Distortion through the layered polycarbonate and pigment causes mirage, whereby the viewer rearranges the pigment into images echoing both the aesthetic and transience of digital media. The physical intersection of the environment of the works creates a visual separation between the viewer and their surroundings, this notion of the imagined image a symptom of the distortion. Linard Osorio invites the audience to consider this misunderstanding, miscommunication, or illusion as metaphor for our contemporary experience – what it means to be separated from certainty, the impossibility of truth. Equally, however, the paintings act as barriers. Their status as art objects firmly states that they are not intended to be touched, that we should be conscious of our interaction. Still, they act as a delineator of space, a means to suggest that the space be reappraised, and navigation reconsidered, but the distortion they create is what clearly marries them to the barrier gesture. Broadly, Linard Osorio invites us to consider what it means to be separated, what separates us, and the ways in which these problems of proximity can be solved. The use of color, application of paint, and refraction of light remind us of possibility and our own ability to reconstruct the environments we inhabit.

Excerpt from a conversation between Guillaume Linard Osorio, and arts writer, Allan Gardner. Paris, 2024 –

AG: Your art practice is built upon an architectural one, your previous field of study. Could you elaborate on your work’s relationship to architecture?

GLO: I studied design and architecture in Paris, in two different schools. What characterizes the "applied" arts in relation to art is the notion of specifications. The fact that basically, the page is not white but that there is a set of data and constraints that are there to guide the project. Personally, I find it easier to work like this than with a blank page. You don't know where you're going, but you know where you shouldn't go, it's quite reassuring. When I started developing my personal work in the studio, the blank page was there and it was impressive. What did I have to say? I didn't know anything about it. What I knew was to find solutions to problems, so I built problems to be able to confront them, as an architect would have done.

AG: These recent freestanding works, particularly those that act as the centerpiece for the exhibition’s performance, are interventions in space. This carries on my previous thoughts around architecture in your practice; I feel that in a way these Screens create a problem for the viewer to solve, how to navigate the space, or identify the point from which the work should be viewed?

GLO: Yes, a painting on the wall defines a universe framed in a defined surface. A painting arranged in the middle of a space makes the space around it vibrate. Beyond looking for a point of view, I want viewers to ask themselves the question of the status of the object and positioning to have with them. Is it a door, a window, a painting, a screen? Can I cross it? Obviously, it’s a threshold.

 This object, or rather this architectural element, raises the question of use without answering it, which shifts the problem from the object to the subject itself. The painting technique I developed on this particular material of alveolar polycarbonate creates ambiguous images that are similar to digital images. The luminosity and transparency of the material accentuates the relationship to the screen when it is entirely paint. My intention with this work is to question our relationship to images, their flow and the desire they arouse.

Our relationship to the media (stream of images and information) has an effect on our relationship to mediums (objects through which they transit) and therefore on the physical world. By placing the image in the center of space, and here collaborating with a choreographer, I question the current media/medium relationship and experiment in some ways with the new relationships that are at stake between the physical body, space, and the image.

AG: It also detaches the viewer from that stream, or that way of viewing media. The idea that we encounter reality in this unilateral mode, equalized by both the disseminative form and vessel through which it's transmitted (the screen). If the dominant form of communication (professional, personal, political et al.) then there's absolutely something to be said from destabilizing that aspect of viewership. Do you have a specific intention with how the viewer might react, interact, or interpret the gesture? Is there a remit for a viewing that could be regarded as successful?

GLO: Putting the painting into space, allowing motion around it, the ability to look through it, I think the first approach will always be the same, but since I partially return the material to its primary function (namely to constitute a window or a filtering wall), I imagine that viewers will have a second feeling more familiar to them. Some screens consist of two walls injected with ink, others with a wall and a vacuum. The first are clearly filter elements, the second invites the passage (or makes an "image" of the environment that is perceived through the frame). But I did not design these elements by anticipating the behavior of the public, who in any case will not dare (and will not be able to) do much other than look. For the occasion, I invited a choreographer to imagine with me the movements that could be associated with these structures. I imagine a pantomime, I would like to replay the famous Marceau mime when he fakes the presence of a bay window with his white gloves. What sense would it make today to replay the interior / exterior relationship in the age of touch screens and barrier gestures?

AG: Barrier gesture is a very interesting phrase. The idea that a measure to prevent, delineate, or dissuade access might not do any of those things in a literal sense but just present the idea to an onlooker that a threshold has been set. I feel that these new works don't so much create a boundary as re-present the notions of how one navigates space – essentially, altering the environment in which they’re placed. Do themes around navigation of space, how one situates themselves within a space, access, etc. permeate these new works?

GLO: The notion of orientation is undoubtedly unavoidable, especially since these dual-screens are mobile and articulate with each other. If we pushed the installation project further by gathering a dozen of these screens, we would have to consider the circulation of the public and in the extreme it would form a kind of labyrinth. I like the idea that these screens, which are artworks and not usual objects, can cause a desire for hybridization of ways of living.

I return to the barrier gesture because there is an interesting link with the notion of screen interface that is at the heart of my work. During the Covid pandemic, seeking to reduce the transmission of the virus, studies were developed on the conductive materials of the virus. Thus it was understood that a copper door handle was naturally virucidal while a plastic or glass surface would keep the virus active for more than 24 hours. This is what encouraged the obsessive use of hydrogels and the compulsive cleaning of the surfaces of our screens. Overnight, sophisticated, shiny, and ultra-smooth tactile surfaces have become anxiety-provoking environments, high-risk places. Would a rule have been violated? We made the image haptic. It reminds me of the admonishments we give to children: "don't put your hands on the window!”. This is undoubtedly why I am returning more and more to my work surface with paint on my fingers: to transgress the rule, to bring a primary gesture to the sophisticated polycarbonate technology, to bring "dirty" to the hygienic, to bring life to the screen.

Guillaume Linard Osorio (b. 1978, France) lives and works in Paris. He is a graduate of the École Boulle and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Malaquais. Linard Osorio’s work has been the focus of three institutional exhibitions, ‘Mémoire de Formes,’ EMBAC, Châteauroux, France, 2023; ‘À Thomas Edison, les papillons reconnaissants,’ Le Mur / Moret, Moret-Loing-et-Orvanne, France, 2023; and‘Iconographie de la table rase’ at Forum of Urbanism and Architecture of Nice, France, 2021. Significant solo and two-person exhibitions include those held at Palazzo Brancaccio, Rome; CARVALHO PARK, New York; and Alain Gutharc, Paris; and group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAMCO Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva; MAC / VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine; l’Espace Croisé Centre d’Art Contemporain, Roubaix; the Bourges Contemporary Art Biennial, Platform, Munich; and Bikini (Resonance program of the Lyon biennial). Linard Osorio has also exhibited at FRAC Bretagne, Ateliers de Rennes / Biennale d'Art Contemporain, La Maréchalerie Center d'art Contemporain, Versailles; HEAD, Geneva; Magasin, Grenoble; Biennale internationale de design de St Etienne, at YGREC ENSAPC, Paris; Rencontres internationales Paris / Berlin / Madrid; and at the Vasarely Foundation, Aix-en-Provence. His work is in the permanent collections of Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs of the French State and FRAC Bretagne (Régional Fund of Contemporary Art of Brittany, France).