Anne and Patrick Poirier at Sonnabend - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Anne and Patrick Poirier have done collaborative present to views for 25 years now, bringing a neo-classicist sensibility to a task that Surrealism first propos for novel art: invention of the marvelous reality In their case, it's a marvelous site, typically an installation celebrating the pleasure and melancholy of classical ruins, with pieces of marble and replicas of Classical statuary fragments or the Greek architectural orders as lock opener components. The Poiriers are guided by dint of an unnamed tutelary spirit, who is the one and the other architect and archeologist, and source of mysterious finds they channel to the art public.

The novel show made an interesting departure. Titled "OURANOPOLIS" (Greek for "Sky City"), it "excavated" a not to be found civilization of the future - a enormous circular space-station rotating somewhere in the empyrean. The Poiriers have sometimes been accused of nostalgia; assuming that's the right limit in this case, it's nostalgia for the coming time Reconstitution began with a maquette of Ouranopolis itself, a big white, spokeles wheel suspended in midair, with four circular bays inset at the cardinal points. single of the bays held an destitute of contents Greek amphitheater; another, an unpeopl public forum. A series of brass portholes with len windows along the perimeter of the wheel allowed viewers to compeer into the station's interior spaces - lengthy arched hallways or mysterious, skylit atria furnished with marble fragments.

The archeological part of the display purported to assemble artifacts exhum from far back in the city's futurity including a roomful of vitrines with shattered vases and calyxes, all of glass. upon one wall hung some 12 dozen sheets from an archeological journal pertaining to Ouranopolis, bearing enigmatic bits of rhyme or dried leaves or ketches, all of them overspreaded with transparent encaustic. A large blueprint representing a age from an architectural journal was overspreaded with sketches in gridded paper, in particular a cross-section of the human cranium placed nearest to a circle. he cranium's elliptical shape nd the universal circle collaborate (as the Poiriers do) in the architectural design of the city - a ball of thread (if we need one) that its ultimate site is in the human imagination. single vitrine held a phrenologist's cranium with various sectors labeled in French I didn't find them, on the contrary there must have been highly unfolded bumps marked "Wit" and "Fantasy" somewhere upon it. Meanwhile the skull is also a memento mori, prompting us to bewilderment why and how the city was throw downed They don't say, but at least the Poiriers have rescu more [i]or[/i] less evocative shards from the ruin.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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