Biography – Written texts
exhibition 2003 : Heidi Wood in the "planète magique"
exhibition 2005 : Los Angeles
exhibition 2008 : use by date
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| works Biography – Written texts exhibition 2003 : Heidi Wood in the "planète magique" exhibition 2005 : Los Angeles exhibition 2008 : use by date |
| Heidi Wood in the "planète magique"
4 June - 12 July 2003 |
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| For "Serving Suggestions", the photographic series she began in 2001, Heidi Wood made paintings that she placed in completely fabricated environments. Her photographs ironically presented these displays in the same way as those in sales catalogues, which aim at arousing consumer interest. Today, for her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Heidi Wood pursues her questioning of the notion of the decorative by setting up her paintings in the "Planète magique" at the Gaîté Lyrique. Going beyond appearances of relations between art and consumption, Heidi Wood continues her fascinating research into the power of the image through a play of interactions among painting, decor and photography. Planète Magique is a deserted fairground, an abandoned amusement park, located in the heart of Paris. Before this Ali Baba’s cave becomes the new haunt of electronic arts, Heidi Wood has made a series of photographs of her paintings. The ultra kitsch decorations and the still-intact magic roundabouts of Planète Magique are an ideal backdrop for adventurous paintings. For Heidi Wood does not like to leave her paintings at rest. She moves them into incongruous places where they nonetheless have every chance of fitting in: their round, sharp and colored geometry owes as much to the vocabulary of artistic formalism as to design or fashion. In short, these forms are too saturated with different sources to not appear original. They are both ho-hum and special, mysteriously timeless and ferociously fashionable. In being thrust into this very eighties atmosphere, the question is whether the paintings will be absorbed by the decor, or whether they will hold their own and manage to defend their autonomy at any cost. Heidi Wood does not tip the balance either way. On the contrary, she does everything to maintain ambiguity. In framing the shots and fine-tuning her paintings to the esthetic of the site, the artist remodels both her paintings and the environment. Thanks to this mise en scène, she creates the conditions for a strange combination of both. Ironically, as in a shop front window, what Heidi Wood is selling us is not the object or the artwork: it’s the ambiance. Judicaël Lavrador March 2003 |
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