Galerie Xippas - Paris

[PARA] While details like recognizable brand logos, familiar elements of home décor, and quotidian electronics firmly relate Cherkit’s scenes to the here and now, references to temporality and abstraction expand time and space on a broader scale. Scenes within the house show glimpses of how children change a home over time, both physically and conceptually. Scattered marbles on the stairway in Glissement , for example, evoke a mixture of playfulness and precarity. A small disembodied hand reaching up to the counter in Yelo Voodoo , meanwhile, consecrates the kitchen as a place for growth and discovery. Similarly, Cherkit’s landscapes reference seasonal changes, showing plants in different stages of growth and wilt. Cherkit’s painting techniques support his desire to extend the scenes he paints beyond a single moment frozen in time. Built up through many layers and thick impastos, the paintings’ stratified and textural surfaces act as material records of the time it takes to complete a painting. Each work bears a unique beveled edge formed by heavily layered paint, which extends well past the natural perimeter of the canvas. By adding mass to his compositions, Cherkit literally and physically pushes his subjects beyond the confines of the canvas. Conversely, the artist also works reductively, carving into the surfaces of his paintings in ways that suggest subtle references to the past. In Grand rue he has used the back of a brush to engrave a cartoonish face into a small area depicting the exterior wall of his neighbor’s house. This and other ghostly presences buried within the paintings’ strata add to their powerful sense of material and conceptual depth. If Cherkit’s paintings expand our experience of temporality, they also collapse traditional distinctions between figuration and abstraction. The kitchen space in Voodoo features familiar furnishings, food items, and cleaning products set within a narrow room that recedes towards a back wall with an open doorway. In addition to a habitable space with narrative connotations, this composition can also be appreciated as a symphony of rectangles in shades of yellow, orange, red and white. Evoking the reverse experience of bringing real-world references to abstract paintings—finding a cityscape in a Mondrian or a landscape in a Rothko, for example—Cherkit’s paintings of domestic scenes studded with abstract forms expand our experience of space, place and time. [PARA]— Mara Hoberman [PARA] Born in 1982 in Paris, Mathieu Cherkit lives and works in Vallery, Bourgogne, France. Mathieu Cherkit is a major figure of the emerging French generation of figurative painters, now exhibited internationally. The inspiration for his works comes mainly from the house where he lives. With one floor and a garden that he cultivates, his residence there serves as a pretext to explore multiple subjects, embodied by trinkets, childhood memories, his recent paternity, or even art works that surround him. It also allows him to approach the subject of painting itself and its power to dismiss realism in order to describe a personal universe. In his colorful works, loaded with oil paint which spills over from the stretcher, Mathieu Cherkit thwarts the principles of central perspective. He mixes viewpoints with the aim of creating different spaces and temporalities and bringing to life the architecture and the objects that he lives with. Mathieu Cherkit is a finalist of Jean-François Prat Prize, as well as of the Science-Po Prize for contemporary art and Antoine Marin Prize. Public collections: Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Musée Estrine, Saint-Rémy de Provence, France; Musée des Avelines, Saint-Cloud, France; CNAP, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Fondation Salomon, Alex, France; Fondation Colas, Paris, France; Caldic Collection/ Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Akzo Nobel, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Xippas Gallery is pleased to present, for the second time in its Geneva space, an exhibition dedicated to the Franco-Argentinian artist Pablo Reinoso. The artist first gained recognition through his monumental interventions in public spaces, both in France and abroad. For this exhibition, he takes over the gallery space with a series of works, some of them previously unseen that engage with a more intimate scale. Through his multidisciplinary practice, Pablo Reinoso moves seamlessly between sculpture, installation, architecture, design, drawing, and painting. His work, often organized in series, explores notions of materiality, function, and space. Using a wide range of materials and media, he questions their intrinsic functions extending, transforming, and reinterpreting them in order to shift them into new aesthetic and conceptual territories.

One hundred years ago, on October 29, 1925, Panayiotis Vassilakis, known as Takis, was born in Athens. The Xippas gallery has chosen to celebrate a double anniversary: the 100th anniversary of Takis’s birth and the 35th anniversary of the gallery, by bringing together a collection of historical works under the curatorship of Alfred Pacquement. A major figure in sculpture since the late 1950s, Takis has set magnetic forces in motion, defying gravity in a universe of light and sound. Fascinated by technology, which he imbues with a poetic dimension, by radars that detect metallic objects in the cosmos, by invisible waves that pass through the atmosphere transmitting messages, Takis chose magnetism as the basis of his visual language. Thus, a simple nail or any other metallic element is levitated by a magnet. In 1960, he pushed this approach to its paroxysm by exhibiting The Impossible, a Man in Space at the Iris Clert Gallery, a portrait of which appears in the exhibition. Suspended in the void and held by magnets, the poet Sinclair Beiles proclaimed «I am a sculpture.» The introduction of light and electromagnets, which add continuous vibrations or sudden, random movements to the devices, broadens the artistic vocabulary. This vocabulary would later include sound, introduced through musical sculptures in which an electromagnet attracts and repels a needle, causing a piano string to vibrate. As early as 1961, Takis dreamed of creating an instrument capable of capturing the music of the beyond, as he wrote in « Estafilades». He further expanded his approach through theatrical performances and monumental installations—such as Trois Totems – Espace musical at the Centre Pompidou (1981)—and by engaging with urban environments, notably with the Light Signals fountain at La Défense (1987). Renos Xippas began working with Takis in 1974. Initially studio director, he quickly became Takis’s confidant and later his gallerist, starting in October 1990 with the opening of his gallery in Paris. Their relationship was marked by an uninterrupted artistic collaboration that spanned 45 years, resulting in over thirty exhibitions in galleries and international institutions. Renos Xippas inaugurated his Paris gallery 35 years ago with what remains, to this day, Takis’s most significant gallery exhibition: a large-scale installation paying homage to Marcel Duchamp, a musical environment, and a forest of light signals that filled every space of the gallery. This new exhibition takes the form of a retrospective anthology, retracing the key moments of the artist’s career. It opens with rare wrought-iron sculptures from 1954, which bear witness to the beginnings of his work, shaped by the dual influence of Giacometti’s hieratic figures and the Greek archaic tradition—an influence echoed in their mythologically inspired titles. Within this selection of historical works retracing the main facets of Takis’s sculpture, one will also find a rare Télésculpture – Jeu d’échecs from 1964, a tribute to Duchamp, as well as a large collection of metal signals, including some of the very first created by the artist. Fascinated by the «iron jungle» he discovered at Calais railway station, Takis began designing his first abstract sculptures by assembling flexible rods with gentle vibrating oscillations, topped with salvaged elements and later enhanced with flashing lights. An «intuitive scholar» as he described himself, Takis succeeded in merging artistic exploration with scientific innovation in a highly original way. Telepaintings and magnetic walls that question the very notion of painting, spherical interior spaces—sometimes exploded—dials with random flashes, pendulums and magnetic balls in constant oscillation, and sound sculptures generating unpredictable music: all of these elements come together in the exhibition, offering a synthesis of a unique visual universe and one of the most essential artistic approaches of recent decades.

Anthological exhibition, works from 1967 to 2025 Curated by Manuel Neves Xippas Gallery is pleased to present, for the first time in its Geneva space, an exhibition dedicated to the Uruguayan artist José Gamarra. The anthological exhibition Whispers in the Forest traces fifty years of creation by this singular artist through an exceptional selection of paintings and drawings. «We must return to the forest where the source of our words lies, the reliquary of signs and forms that haunt us — not knowing whether it threatens us or is favorable to us.» Édouard Glissant In José Gamarra’s 2024 painting La Vigie (the watcher), we see a canoe peacefully crossing a river. Four figures are inside. At the center, Jesus of Nazareth is flanked by a dog and escorted by a demon, both watched over by a Spanish conquistador armed with an arquebus. Everything described appears consistent with the narrative of colonial Baroque art created in the Americas, but the scene is completed by one final figure who not only adds an incongruous and fantastical dimension to the work, but also anchors it in the contemporary context it projects. This final figure, the one steering the boat, is Superman. The famous American superhero is cast as an emblem of North American culture and politics across the American continent (and the Western world). Likewise, in the detailed jungle setting surrounding the scene described above, an Indigenous person can be seen observing the scene.

Berlin-based artist Olaf Holzapfel, who was a guest at Villa Kamogawa from September to December 2024, will appear in the autumn session of the Setouchi Triennale 2025. Ibuki Island is an impressive testament to human settlement and the interrelationship with nature. Up to 4,000 people lived on this small island exclusively from fishing. Their lives were directly connected to the elements, the creatures and their living conditions. The relationship between these life forms always depends on mutual understanding. The same idea was also explored in old stories such as the fairy tale ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’ , written by the Romantic poet Philipp Otto Runge. Holzapfel sets the story in a traditional Japanese house where many children once lived. In a stage setting, three universal craft techniques are presented that have timeless significance in both Japan and Germany: dyeing, straw weaving and carpentry. Japanese actress Miho Takayasu (https://mihotakayasu.com/) narrates the fairy tale in the animated film created by Holzapfel and Moritz Stumm. Like the fairy tale, the installation deals with the relationship between humans and nature, its cycles, the challenges of human desires and the limits of material existence. And with the realization that these limits are also the place of home, like the house in which the installation takes place, like the island that is home to the people. Holzapfel thus takes up a theme that is as familiar to the fishermen of Ibuki Island as it is to other craftsmen: the relationship and balance between our bodies and the elements. Olaf Holzapfel Holzapfel uses the idea of light play to create a unified space that incorporates the installation, the history of the venue, and the island of Ibukijima itself. Olaf Holzapfel created his work with the support of two Japanese craft companies: UEJIMA SANGYÔ (https://kyoto-uejima.com/) , a manufacturer of traditional shimenawa from Wazuka/Kyoto, and SOMAKOSHA (https://www.somakosha.com/) , a company specializing in timber construction from Okayama.