Premonition Objects

This exhibition is the first presentation in the United States of the work of French artist Daniel Pommereulle (1937-2003). The work of this cult Parisian artist, virtually unknown in the US, is shown here at Ramiken in a selection of seven sculptures and three burnt-paper works, spanning the years 1966-1978. Four of the sculptures in this show were exhibited in the artist’s 1975 solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Return (1966) is a thickly encrusted painter’s palette, installed on the floor as a booby trap. This piece is one of several works by the artist from the mid ‘60s that anticipate violent events. Objet Hors Sasie (1964), a paint can studded with razor blades, is featured in the 1967 Rohmer film La Collectionneuse, a hilarious classic of the French New Wave, starring Pommereulle as himself. Cible par d’autres visées (1963-64) is a coil of barbed wire, painted light blue. Both objects, intentionally dangerous to the touch, are safely behind glass on display in the Pompidou today. These highbrow invocations of anarchic antisocial impulses, offering an alternate French version of disaffection, are embedded with the social unrest of the time in Paris preceding May 68. Pommereulle, who had been unwillingly conscripted into the Algerian War, was extremely active in Paris during the demonstrations, strikes, and occupations, at one point publishing with other artists and writers an infamous flyer calling for violent resistance against the oppression of the state. Pommereulle, who quit art in 1967 to make experimental films, returned to sculpture in 1973 with an untitled work consisting of a straight razor attached to a vial of oil, set askew on a ball of lead. This work leads to the Objets de Premonition (1974-1975): overturned steel paint buckets, capped with lead and punctuated with stilettos, scalpels, and chisels. The works exist like hedgehogs, impossible to handle, and sit on mirror polished brass pedestals, which have been refabricated for this exhibition to match the presentation at the Pompidou in 1975. Three of the works in this show, made 1975-76, introduce lead as the primary medium. The artist hammered lead sheets into thick, malleable lengths resembling twisted rope. These lead tentacles, embedded with blades, were then bent by the artist into rough geometric structures with projecting limbs. The larger works from this series, shown at Galerie Jean Arcade in 1976, are only known from photographs, as few have survived. Exhibited here is a small tableau of lead sentinels set on a rubber slab, connected to a rectangular gate, which sparkles with scalpels set like teeth into the crossbar. Another lead form, but cast in bronze, extends a single knurled bronze fist upward, rising from a chunky foot, and wrapped around a stiletto. A triptych of flat lead slabs, alternately embedded with fish hooks and stilettos, is more defensive and inscrutable, with sharp barbs as dense as hair, but facing inward. Three burnt-paper works from 1978, from the series titled Brûlure du Ciel, are large celestial monochromes punctuated by scorched holes burned through the paper by the artist with a lit cigarette, revealing a background color of white or yellow paper. The holes are loosely arranged in recognizable constellations, establishing Pommereulle’s own starry night as an elegant performance of casual abuse. Pommereulle never showed his work in New York; this exhibition, curated by Armance Léger and Boris Bergmann, and accompanied by a film program at Metrograph, corrects that error. —M.E.

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389 Grand Street

New York, NY