Carlos Kusnir

By lumping together all the formal challenges of painting, the better to get rid of them, the oeuvre of Carlos Kusnir (born in 1947 in Buenos Aires, he has lived and worked in Paris and Marseille since the 1980s) dodges the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction, and reality and representation. A mixture of fantasy and artistic rigour, apparent clumsiness and technical virtuosity, distance from and infiltration into everyday life, invariably somewhere between brutality and refinement, his painting often moves away from the conventional frame of the picture. Carlos Kusnir conceives his oeuvre like an extension of his environment and as a receptacle for memories of his travels. In it he includes various objects—braces and struts and other impromptu supports, wood offcuts, chairs, brooms, curtains, cloths and wallpaper from Argentina, Ukraine and the Czech Republic--, accompanies his pictures with acoustic elements (words, radio...) and "installs" them directly on the ground, or precariously affixed to walls using wooden set squares. A dialogue is thus introduced between the pictures at the very moment when, in uncertain equilibrium, these overcome the décor, and drag themselves out of the museum, letting the fragility of the structure appear.
(Presses du reel).