FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Mathieu Briand
UBÏQ: A Mental Odyssey—Landing on the valley of the Alps
November 30, 2007 – January 12, 2008
Martos Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Mathieu Briand's UBÏQ: A Mental Odyssey—Landing on the valley of the Alps. The opening reception will be held November 30 from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be present.
Martos Gallery is offering Briand the opportunity to create a hybrid interpretation of his ten chapter, year long show at Galerie Maisonneuve in Paris, where he developed his project UBÏQ: A Mental Odyssey. Scrutinizing the interweaving of life experience and the imprint it leaves on the imagination, Briand fathoms the quality of today's world whose reality is confined in the naming of it alone. When confronted with each other, neither life nor imagination has the upper hand, but what we consider as real is the constant intertwining of both. To this end, Briand has partly adopted the visual language of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 cult film, A Space Odyssey. Kubrick's recurring associations create an idiosyncratic, aesthetic vocabulary, which blends the whole. What's more, the influence of the film is expressed in the radical reversal of time passing.
The appropriate word to describe Briand's project is manipulation. Using material objects and visual events, Briand leads us into his private world, made of either self-experienced or dreamed personal references. These references are brought together and distanced again. In the illusionist perspective thus created, another world emerges, with multiple entrances and no known frontiers.
While questioning, and even dissecting, a certain number of elements, Briand attempts to uniquely lead each viewer and achieves this with compulsory questions about one's surroundings. The outcome of this seminal obligation requires the unraveling of threads—the threads of one's own perception of the world, of one's own history.
Briand lives and works in Paris. His work has been shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern Turbine Hall in London, the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts; at Red Cat in Los Angeles; the Istanbul Biennale, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, at SITE Santa Fe, and Art Basel 38 Unlimited, among others.
Martos Gallery is located at 540 West 29 Street between 10 and 11 Avenues. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm.