Société Réaliste - Bertrand Lamarche · Société Réaliste create symbolic and visual confrontations to criti- cally examine such structures without resorting to easy denunciations

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Société Réaliste is an art collective founded by Ferenc Grof (1972) and Jean-Baptiste Naudy (1982)..

Société Réaliste

Société Réaliste, Installation for the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, State of Shades: Hungarian National Painting Grey. Average Colour of 684 Major Paintings from

the Hungarian National Gallery’s Collection, 2012



Société Réaliste is an art collective founded by Ferenc Grof (1972) and Jean-Baptiste Naudy (1982).

Their work consists in appropriating and distorting the tools of communication of power structures (maps, emblems, signs, architecturs). Société Réaliste create symbolic and visual confrontations to criti-cally examine such structures without resorting to easy denunciations.

They operate in subtle comparisons, extrapolations, and statistic interpretations, shedding light on histo-rical evolutions and trends and producing tools for reading the contemporary world.

Soiété Réaliste’s work has been shown in a number of exhibitions in France, at the Biennale de Lyon in 2009, at the Jeu de Paume (their solo show «Empire, State, Building») in 2011, and at the Fondation Kadist, but also in numerous exhibits abroad, at Budapest’s Ludwig Museum in 2012, at the Contemporary Art Museum of Bucarest in 2011, at the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum in 2012, at the Dunaujvaros Institute of Contemporary Art in 2012, the Sheila C. Johnson Desing Center in New York in 2012, at the Leon MUSAC in 2012, at the TOP Contemporary Art Center in Shanghai in 2011, at the University of Maryland Baltimore Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture, at the Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella in 2010, and others.



UN Camouflage (France), 2012,Flag100 x 150 cmPhoto : Christophe BrachetCourtesy Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris



UN Camouflage (Chine), 2012, 100 x 150 cmPhoto : Christophe BrachetCourtesy Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris



U.N Camouflage, 2012Installation, 193 flags, 100 x 150 cm, Édition 3 + 2 EAInstallation views on the bridge Léopold-Sédar-Senghor, Paris - FIAC Hors les murs 2013



U.N Camouflage (Map of the world), 2012Digital print on diasec, frame193,5 x 128 cm



UN Camouflage (Etats-Unis), 2012, Flag100 x 150 cmPhoto : Christophe BrachetCourtesy Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris



UN Camouflage (LGBT), 2012, Flag100 x 150 cm



Solo show of Société Réaliste, FIAC, 2013



View of the exhibition How High the Moon at Galerie Jérôme Poggi and detail of the perforated tableList of minor planets in Appendix: from 5666 (François Rabelais) to 6000 (United Nations), 2013Perforated table and chairsTable: 130 x 50 x 74 cm, chairs: 41 x 37,5 x 80 cmUnique



Single Party Anthem, 2013digital print onpaper mat 180 g65 x 36 cmÉdition of 3 + 2 EA



Weighted Average Anthem for Cyprus, 2013digital print onpaper mat 180 g103 x 63 cmÉdition of 5 + 2 EA



A Gift from Birobidzhan, 2011Steel sculpture, engraved manhole Diameter : 60 cm ; depth : 6 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



Universal Date, 2012Steel sculpture130 x 25 cmÉdition of 3 + 2 EA



Quote / End of Quote, 2010Steel sculpture40 x 20 cmÉdition of 3 + 2 EA



Proposal for a New Alphabetical Order (US Dollar), 2010Enamel plate80 x 65 cmUnique



Stars of the World, 2012Enamel plate90 X 60 cm

Each of these enamel plates has been made starting from the superimposition of every flag comprising moons, stars, and suns.The superimposition has then been redrawn on one unique plan to create new flags containing all the moons, stars and suns of the world.



Exhibition view «Empire, State, Building», Jeu de Paume, 2011 © Adrien Chevrot



Exhibition view «Empire, State, Building», Jeu de Paume, 2011



Zero Euro, 2011Sculpture, painted Polystyrol100 x 55 x 25 cm



Limes New Roman, 2009-201024 enamel platesEach 15 x 30 cmEdition of 3 + 2

«Limes New Roman» is a typographical font elaborated by Société Réaliste. This cryptography associates the 23 letters of the imperial alphabet to 46 contemporary walls representing geopolitical separations in the world: 23 at the scale of towns are the lower case letters, 23 at the scale of countries are the upper case letters.



The Future is the Extension of the Past by Other Means, 2009-2012Enamelplate80 x 60 cm

In this work, the sentence written in «Limes New Roman» means «the future is the extension of the past by other means», and takes the shape of the infinity symbol. It reveals, not by reading but only by the act of looking that the geopolitical separation are cyclistic and continuous in the world and time.



Empire of Soviets represents the visual translation in seven sister-steps of the phantasmagoric passage between two contemporary towers, one which was built and the other never: the Empire State Building by William F. Lamb, built in 1931 in New York, and the Palace of the Soviets by Boris Iofan, projected for Moscow also in 1931.

Giovanna Zapperi, Temporal Architectures, in Société Réaliste catalogue for «Empire, State, Building»

Empire of Soviets, 2011Steel sculpture24 x 40 x 30 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.PCsarba Makra Collection



Archiscripton, 2011Aluminum sculpture on stone base185 x 60 x 32 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



Spectral Aerosion, 2011Painted and engraved Necurite 104 x 64 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



L’ avenir dure longtemps, Appendix, 2010View of the installation at the 2nd Biennial of Rennes, Couvent des Jacobins, 2010 Installation, 4.400 names perforated in the cement groundUnique

«L’avenir dure longtemps, Appendix» was realized in the Black Friars Convent, on the occasion of the 2nd Rennes Biennial, in the vicinity of an archeological excavation which revealed that the site had been used as a burial ground for a thousand years.

Having established a general map of the convent on the basis of the alphabetical list - transcripted in Appendix typeset - of the 165,000 inhabitants of the city who were over 18 in 2009, the cooperative followed this map to select the 4,400 patronyms located in the exhibition room it had been attributed. Société Réaliste and volunteers then methodically carved these names, one by one, into the cement ground.

The experience sought to examine the futurological effect on an ongoing cemetery, hosting people yet living.



The Fountainhead, 2010Video DVD, 111 mn, produced by the Academy Jan van Eyck in Maastricht and directed by Greg Lan-glois Edition of 5

Société Réaliste’s full-length movie The Fountainhead (2010) is based on the 1949 eponymous capitalist propaganda film written by Ayn Rand, arch-priestess of American libertarianism and author of some of its biggest cultural myths.

The original studio movie tells the story of a character based on the figure of Frank Lloyd Wright - fighting against a surrounding collective decadence

Société Réaliste has removed the sound and deleted every human presence to reduce the film to its set and décor, its ideological architecture.



As an echo to the disappearance of the topic in the film, Société Réaliste presents Commonscript (2011), a series of 48 panels, equitably melting emptied videograms extracted from The Fountainhead with inscriptions. The images show stereotypical and almost abstracted modernist architectural views from a Prime City (New York), extracted from the original 1949 film script. The sentences are the main ideological affirmations personally stated by the hero that have been systematically transcripted by Société Réaliste in the plural form. Turning a supposedly autonomous discourse into a generalized one, allows to counter-balance the ideal views of a standardized world. The link between the personal and the general in the inscriptions is made in a new font designed by Société Réaliste entitled Falling Haus (2011). This centaur font is the hybridization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s font named «Exhibition», and Josef Albers’ global-abstract font, known as «Universal».

Commonscript, 2011Series of 48 pannels



Ellipse by Eclipse, 2011Lightbox78 x 60 x 15 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



Function as Fiction, 2011Lightbox78 x 60 x 15 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



Runes of Ruines, 2011Lightbox78 x 60 x 15 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



Voices for Voids, 2011Lightbox78 x 60 x 15 cmEdition of 3 + 2 A.P



MERCY, 201331 marble plates, golden engraves, 20 x 30 cm each Unique



Exhibition views «Empire, State, Building» Musée Ludwig de Budapest, 2012



Futurum Exactum, 2011Oil painting on framed canvas150 x 100 cmUnique

Futurum Exactum, whose title is taken from a book of Sándor Ujvári published in 1927, is a representation of the nazi architect Albert Speer’s ‘law of ruins’ applied to the Germania model, his project for a capital of the 3rd Reich.

Documents

Société Réaliste - Bertrand Lamarche · Société Réaliste create symbolic and visual confrontations to criti- cally examine such structures without resorting to easy denunciations