For this seventh installment of the Antidote exhibition series at the Galerie des Galeries, Guillaume Houze wanted to highlight the graphic artist Jean-Marc Ballee and the work he did for the catalog of Ginette Moulin and Guillaume Houze’s collection.
The catalog is especially original in its composition and makeup thanks to the inclusion of twelve pages of black-and-white drawings by Ballee that were inspired by the world of Comic books. Dipping into Ginette Moulin and Mr. Houze’s collection of contemporary art, Ballee selected a group of works that he looked at from a purely formal point of view in order to lend them new life as characters, monsters, even landscapes through the prism of his drawing. Mr. Houze was quite taken by Ballee’s joining of these works, which were suddenly infused with new energy thanks to their insertion in two different story lines, and he invited the graphic artist to serve as a co-curator of an exhibition that would imagine a coming together of pieces from his collection and drawings by Ballee.
In the gallery space, small concentrations of works will take shape, encouraging a range of cross-references between pieces by artists like Michel Blazy, Ugo Rondinone and Pierre-Olivier Arnaud. Visitors will also find scattered among these works drawings by Ballee, which in turn make up the synopsis of the story woven throughout the show. Taking the form of large posters, the drawings will organize the space structurally and create a stimulating interaction with the featured works of art.
The graphic artist Jean-Marc Ballee is especially interested in questions of fiction and narrative. His career to date has taken him to various creative fields, from contemporary art (with Adel Abdessemed, Fabrice Hyber and Sophie Ristelhueber), to design ( Petite histoire de la capsule d’habitation en images, with Alexandra Midal), to architecture (with Rem Koolhaas and Dominique Perrault). Mr. Ballee is currently preparing a cinema adaptation of Graham Masterton’s novel Ritual (1988), which he is shooting as a short film in woods near Philadelphia.
