A glossy and luxurious exhibition catalogue including an illustration board with 24 bittersweet photographs.
The volume opens with a poetic and free text by art critic Samuel Gross and also reveals a glass mosaic sculpture that seems to animate throughout the book-like reading a disproportionate flip book. It is a “firework” (title of the work exhibited at
Mamco) but immobilized, hardened, as if frozen by the cold of the spring snow. As often with Denis Savary, his work is both opaque and open.
Published following the exhibition “Neige de printemps” at
Mamco, Geneva, from June 10 to September 13, 2015.
Spanning a wide range of mediums, from drawing to video, performing arts to sculpture, the work of Denis Savary (born 1981 in Granges Marnand, Switzerland, lives and works in Lausanne) fictionalizes fragments of art and literature, and deals with historical figures such as Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Félix Vallotton, and Lautréamont. Savary's practice weaves narratives steeped in childhood fantasies and adult phantasmagoria, notably through a vision of exhibition as a domestic place that the spectator can inhabit.