Montbéliard | ArtRegion: Basel - Oberrhein

Le 19 – Centre régional d’art contemporain

Kelly Weiss: À votre contact, se confondre

8. Februar – 4. Mai 2025

[At your contact, blending in]

“To start with, then, there isn’t very much:
nothingness, the impalpable, the virtually
immaterial; extension, the external, what is
external to us, what we move about in the midst
of, our ambient milieu, the space around us.
Space. Not so much those infinite spaces […]
but spaces that are much closer to hand,
in principle anyway: towns, for example, or
the countryside, or the corridors of the Metro,
or a public park.”
(Avant-Propos de Georges Perec in Espèces d’espaces, Éditions Galilée, 1974)

AH! OH! by Ricardo Basbaum and À votre contact, se confondre [At your contact, blending in] by Kelly Weiss are two exhibitions that share a certain ‘poetics of space’. Both explore plastic, conceptual and relational variations, resulting from a negotiation undertaken with the context of the art centre and its architecture. Based on a close observation of the ins and outs of the historic building, and of the movement and communication between its different parts, Kelly Weiss and Ricardo Basbaum took on the different types of space as playgrounds. She and he come then to certain kind of ‘agreements’.

AH! OH! and À votre contact, se confondre [At your contact, blending in] both respond to specific logics of scores and ‘mise en scène’. These are fluid, however, and open to the collaboration of the publics, who become the guarantors of the constant evolution and even reconstruction of the exhibitions themselves.

“I like to experiment with materials. I began to develop my work by observing urban and industrial spaces. I try to reproduce surfaces, take materials in hand and translate gestures seen elsewhere. If I had to talk about a method, I would say that I try to move and replace. My conception of painting is above all a matter of reframing.”

Kelly Weiss (b. 1996, Belfort, France; lives and works in Lyon, France) is a painter whose practice extends to sculpture, space, installation and performance. In her work, she incorporates reclaimed industrial materials such as lorry tarpaulins, sheets, pallets and even rust, which she extracts from altered metal elements, creating site-specific pictorial projects that engage in a dialogue with the place in which they are deployed.

Kelly Weiss considers that her artistic approach and her specific interest in the peripheries5 are linked to the industrial context of the area where she grew up. This influences in part the type of materials she uses, but also her creative process, which is strongly driven by the logic of wandering and collecting. The latter imbues the works with the vibrancy of memories of fragments collected or situations observed. The artist believes that her practice can only develop from this mutual contribution between her painterly gesture and the new elements that present themselves to her when she crosses spaces and territories. The allusive dimension of her work resists an approach based on meaning, in favor of one based on sensation, vibration and even diversion.