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IAN KIAER
Melnikov project, black facade, 2011. Vue de l'installation.
Courtesy of the artist and galery Alison Jacques, London, and Kunstverein of Francfort.
Les Prairies's artists
Ian Kiaer's art is developing around the concept of projects, using utopian architecture
and its creators as a starting point. In keeping with the architectural model, his
installations are placed at floor level and on the walls. Their scale as models is also that
of the project. The fragile materials, in spite of their ordinariness (packaging, plastic,
cardboard, etc.) and their faded colours, situate his artworks at that intermediary stage
between idea, ideal and execution. His is a plastic art of composition and detail and
of the sublime colour of everyday objects in an imaginative vision, summoning up the
painting of an age that depicted reality as a dream. Ian Kiaer's pictorial and sculptural
art occupies the same dimension as Utopia: the introspective and imaginary time
dimension of potentialities in which reality is prepared. For Les Prairies Kiaer looked at
the former telecommunications centre that Louis Arretche completed in 1972, an imposing
building that exudes utter confidence in Modernist architectural style – a style, it has to
be said, that already appeared somewhat dated in the seventies, as the Retro-futuristic
aesthetic of the building indicates. The scale of the building, unlike the potential and
introspective nature of "paper architecture", provoked the artist into a power struggle
leading him to reflect on other modes of production. By acquiring and using some of the
original windows, Kiaer was able to rethink the architectural project as a proposition and
a ruin, which he interpreted, using the architect's archives, in his own language through
paintings, models and projections.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1971 in London (Great-Britain), where he lives and works.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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