Ten years after his first exhibition at the gallery, David Mach returns to take over the premises from 21 September to 17 November 2007 and shows us his latest works, based on the theme of Iconography. For his fourth personal exhibition at the gallery, David Mach once again makes use of those day-to-day objects that we come across every day but no longer see. In releasing a creative force and unsuspected beauty from these items, he manages yet again to surprise and enchant us. In the tradition of the 20th Century masters such as Schwitters and Duchamp, who turned everyday objects into works of art, David Mach transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

As is usual in his titles, the artist plays with words to present us his “iconography”, his personal view of our contemporary icons. With its matchstick figures, a richly-coloured world opens up to us and fires our imagination, giving new life to figures as strong as Buddha, Marilyn Monroe, Barbie, Mao, Mohammed Ali, etc. These personalities, known by all, admired and even sometimes worshipped to the point of wanting to be possessed, are thus offered to us today like trophies. But the artist now goes further with large-size heads, creating real four-dimensional sculptures; not content with a simple mask, his technical mastery enables him to assemble and glue matches together to make up a full head.

His new coathanger works reveal other figures from David Mach’s personal Pantheon, created in proportions close to reality: a Sitting Woman, a woman sitting on the ground in a classic iconic posture similar to those we saw on certain posters in the 1970’s, and a Gorilla walking on its 4 limbs, whose stature reminds us unmistakably of the illustrious King Kong.
Like the matchstick works, these coathanger works are not exempt from paradox either. Using this rather cold object, David Mach manages to recreate the sensuality of a body; the artist’s prowess is also that he can turn a simple metal coathanger, a poor, purely utilitarian industrial object, into a sculpture whose monumental nature asserts itself on the spectator, a figure that seems to float inside its own aura, an aura created artificially by the coathanger hooks placed carefully at regular intervals.

The third aspect of his recent creations is the new series of collages by David Mach, which were the impetus for this exhibition. Like XYZ portraying Zinedine Zidane and Laughing Buddha exhibited at FIAC 2006, these new works illustrate more than ever the artist’s sense of excessiveness and his technical virtuosity in his assemblages. David Mach here transposes the meticulousness of his sculptural work into a unique material, hundreds of copies of a single postcard which he juxtaposes in a surprising, spectacular manner to compose large portraits (approximately 2 x 2 m).
David Mach worked on this new type of collage for a year and a half to give birth to this Iconography. Here, his favourite material is provided by the many postcards bearing the effigy of members of the British Royal Family, those eternal icons of British identity popular also with many foreign tourists. From this complex, historic iconography there suddenly emerges a new, contemporary, colourful and apparently playful iconography, but one that is equally charged with history…

Alongside these surprising portraits, to celebrate Paris, which is itself an icon, David Mach offers us one of the most spectacular collages that he has ever produced, this time by juxtaposing very diverse, varied images taken from magazines, personal photos… In Seine is an imaginary fresco created specially during the winter of 2006/2007 for the Paris National Opera and exhibited from January to April 2007 in the form of a tarpaulin on the facade of the Palais Garnier. The Seine, populated with tropical underwater life and holidaymakers enjoying water sports, seems to submerge Paris’ main monuments in an insane surrealistic vision that is perfectly expressed in the title of the work.

PRESS CONTACT: Emmanuelle de Noirmont / Ludyvine Travers-Pitrou
Tel : +33 (0)1.42.89.89.00 / Fax : +33 (0)1.42.89.89.03 / E-mail : info@denoirmont.com
IMAGES 300 dpi available on request at the gallery.