Sinthome

Richard Taittinger Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Sinthome, a group show featuring the work of Haluk Akakçe, Ding Yi, Théo Mercier, Alexander Ponomarev, Recycle Group, and Wang Du.

An international forum for new ideas in contemporary art, Richard Taittinger Gallery presents an ambitious program dedicated to cultivating a critical dialogue between artists, viewers, and institutions. Embracing its emerging location in the New York cultural landscape, the gallery supports the work of mid-career artists with significant global recognition.

Sinthome – the archaic spelling of the word symptom in French – refers not only to the creative process, but also to the work of art itself. For psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1900- 1981), the sinthome consists in the Borromean Knot’s fourth ring, holding together the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary realms of the psyche.

Through a creative process, the artist may be attempting to write his or her sinthome. Stemming from the subject experience of lack, artistic creations might provide an answer, structured like a language, to the question of the artist’s desire and symptoms. Any work of art may be ascribed to the real, the imaginary or the symbolic, depending on its inherent characteristics, evocation and corporeality. Not only is this inscription dependent on the artist’s creative process, it also lays in the gaze of the Other – the viewer as imagined by the artist or an actual person.

When looking at an object, the viewer begins to freely associate in order to create meaning through his or her own sinthome. Each visitor is invited to experience the artworks as real, imaginary or symbolic, and to create his or her own fourth ring through the unconscious structuring of the exhibition, “à la manière” of a sinthome. Richard Taittinger Gallery offers this frame to the exhibition with the hope that it leads to a unique experience of knotting and unknotting real, imaginary and symbolic.

Sinthome features the work of seven internationally renowned artists: Multi-media artist Haluk Akakçe, originally from Turkey, explores the role of technology in manipulating human perceptions in the current age through alternate time and space on two-dimensional surfaces. D i n g Y i , an artist based in China, perceives painting as an ideal form of reflection and retrospection to pursue a space devoid of meaning by repeating the simple visual motif of a cross shape. The work of French artist Théo Mercier draws from the visual vocabulary of Dada and Surrealists to play with the idea of lost civilizations and the combination of sadness and magic within their mystery. Alexander Ponomarev, from Ukraine, emphasizes the human imagination as a major component of the creation of machines and how they collapse the difference between technology and art. Russian artists A n d r e y B l o k h i n and Georgy Kuznetsov form Recycle Group to express their concern about the rising level of material waste as a byproduct of widespread consumerism. Chinese-born Wang Du delivers a cynical view on the mechanisms of all media and its global control over individual perceptions of reality.