The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to announce the first institutional solo exhibition of David Hominal, presenting amongst other works, two specially conceived sculptures and a new video.

In Hominal’spractice painting functions as a cynosure of installation, sculpture, video, performance and the painted canvas. His diverse practice is deeply rooted in a coherent questioning of the possibilities open to contemporary painting, as well as an awareness of painting’s synaesthetic potential within the realms of music and dance. Subjacent in his oeuvre is a sense of infinite regress and discomfort, where the artist renders physical and three- dimensional the concepts of pictorial and artistic annihilation and dissipation, without however falling into the modernist trap of negation.

On the one hand this spirit of regress encompasses a desire to disrupt the historical stability of pictorial representation, and so counter the stasis of reification of the canvas. Indeed, the artist refers to the desire to negate the object, to dematerialize painting. On the other hand, Hominalstrives to force the painterly act to be, as artist Martin Kippenberger once said, “beside itself” through a series of operations including infinite dislocations, fragmentations and degradations.

Landscape (half hard), 2010, stands as a long and narrow, rectangular aluminium-clad sculpture, spanning the gallery space. This monumental structure, functions as a gigantic mirror, diffusely portraying the space around it. It reflects the summer’s sunshine, so as to disturb the viewer’s gaze and at the height of the day practically render it blinded. “Landscape (half hard)” represents a reductionist gesture regarding base pictorial elements – light and vision. Angled in front of this work is Untitled (purple) (2010), a series of free-standing screens, whose absorbing purple surface render them antinomes of the gigantic sculpture they face.

Hominal’s new video L’Après-midi d’un faune (2010) lends its evocative title to the exhibition. The work was filmed by the artist, over a period of four years, in his studio as well as in various domestic locations and non-spaces. The camera follows the artist’s hand in close-up, as it nervously feels its way across the floor. Hominal’s hand appears to touch-read the space, searching for invisible minutiae, in a sort of nihilistic dance. “L’Après-midi d’un faune” is also the title of Russian choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s famous ballet of 1912. The dance emphasized the beastly side of humanity and was performed with marked lateral movements; these are formal and emotional elements that find an echo in Hominal’ new video work.

A publication and a limited edition will be published to commemorate the occasion of this exhibition.

Curated by Katya García-Antón