With a view to the exhibition 5C5C, my attention focused on the artists, Regine Kolle and Shanta Rao, whose work provides new information and enlightens my vision of current art production in the city of Paris.

While this exhibition may seek to present artwork that reflects current contemporary art practice in five respective cities, it remains questionable as to what extent individual artists can be seen to define current tendencies in their city or place of production.

Defining art practice in any given location, while idealistic, would appear unrealistic; particularly at a point in time when the well freighted term and phenomenon of globalization is now a given. However, the notion that art can reflect a particular place or point in time is perfectly legitimate, or at least it has been until recently. However, artwork originating from a city such as Paris, a location at present free of political upheaval, social unrest, relatively unaffected by economic woes and unscathed by natural disasters, limits the scope for a 'reactionary practice,' if indeed local climate is to be drawn upon. In fact, if we are to compare France to other localities, it is free of the majority of urgent global issues.

Nonetheless, there are French artists visible on the international art circuit that have been singled out as defining current art practice. Some of these artists have been cited as exemplifying current trends or movements. Movements regrouped artists under a common umbrella; the Relational Aesthetics theory of the late 1990s added itself to a long and worthy line of 'isms' invented to name movements throughout the history of modern art in France. No doubt as I write, yet another defining tendency or trend is being formulated.

Being unable to put a name to something is disconcerting. However, some among us shy away from easily articulated trends, shunning the order they bring to the mayhem of diversity. Linear histories are reassuring, yet do not help the majority of individual practices gain visibility. Too often, the light shone on certain practices has caused shadow to be cast on many, causing more loss to the public than detriment to artists.

My focus is on the individuals whose 'course' has been independent and at times resistant to the tendencies surrounding them. The art practices of Regine Kolle and Shanta Rao have little in common, apart from the fact that their art studios are located less than one mile apart in a culturally diverse district in the north of Paris. Coincidentally, my first encounter with both artists was through self-portraits. In 2008 I had the opportunity to work with Regine Kolle on an exhibition that included her work. Unknown to me at the time the drawing, “Osterreich”, depiction of a ‘boy’ paddling a raft downstream, was in fact the artist, aged 9 on a family holiday to Austria. The following year, while viewing the exhibition ‘On Ne Voit Rien Venir,’ I was intrigued by a black and white still frame from an animation by Shanta Rao, “Terminaisons Nerveuses”. Later, on meeting the artist, I recognised that the shadow of a woman's figure in the foreground of the piece was hers.

Arriving in France from neighbouring Germany, Regine Kolle used the word “exotic” to describe the artistic environment she encountered here. This reminded me of what the artist Paul Chan said referring to locality and temporality which I feel significant to this particular exhibition: “Art is, and has been many things. For art to become art now, it must feel perfectly at home, nowhere.”

“Cemetery” (2003), is an earlier glance at a more 'painterly' work than the cartoon-like paintings often identified as Regine Kolle's signature-style. A cropped image sets the scene; two figures and a tombstone stand erect in a cemetery. Unprimed canvas and loosely drawn lines contrast with the flatly-applied paint of amorphous trees. The nuances of green are as numerous as the scene's possible interpretations; brothers? Friends? A funeral, a plot gone wrong? Echoes of a Cassavetes movie. From painterly representations to cartoon style works, Regine Kolle's work has shifted in both directions at once. Refusing to distinguish between drawing and painting results in direct spontaneous works. The painting, “Cemetery” is more than a nod towards the 'Bad Painting' movement of the 1970s. However, rather than 'discarding classical drawing modes' (as the American figurative painters had done), Kolle adopted a mindless manner to paint, in response to the high-minded Duchampian approach encountered when she arrived in France from her native Germany in the early 1990s. Undaunted by an art scene in which painting was hardly favorably regarded, her decision to paint anyway probably went against the grain. This audacity is indicative of a spirit that underpins both Regine Kolle's practice and her person. And yet she is careful to insist, ''Painting was not my cause''.

Whilst the title “That is the Question” (2011), is an unmistakable reference to Shakespeare's soliloquy, the painting itself is composed of images gleaned from a multitude of sources ranging from book covers, logos and comics to old photographs, cinema and television. With swiftly executed brushstrokes, the figure of a young girl is traced. The same broad outlines reappear as monochrome in Kolle's numerous wall drawings. A castle wall acts as the backdrop, a precipice symbolic of a crucial decision to be made and the perilous task at hand. Seized in the moment, 'To be or not to...’? A bowed chin and raised eyebrow denotes the girl's perplexed state, wavering on the brink of destiny. Yet the skull in her hand is not that of Yorick, but of a monkey; workers gloves replace Hamlet’s gauntlets. The existential dilemma is made light of, echoing the sentiment of The Clash’s 70s hit song ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. This hint of humor and wit is ever-present in the work of Regine Kolle. As is her attempt to swing situations around and emphasize the absurdity of life and circumstance. Kolle's choice of titles is clearly a reference to this, with names ranging from “Sick Nurse”, to “Scared Cop” or “Sheik Yerbouti in Mount Rushmore”. If the notion of politics exists in the work, it is not apparent. What is present however is a certain humanity and awareness of the human condition, a social conscience filters through.

The helmeted face of “Yity” (2008), smiles out from the 30 x 30cm canvas, this portrait of the motel employee makes a sharp contrast with the 183 x 82cm portrait of author Donna Tartt, with her imposing aura of another era. The subjects of Kolle's portraits are rarely ordinary. Coincidently, her 1998 portrait of Thomas Pynchon was painted at the same time as artist Elizabeth Peyton's “Sid Vicious Arrested, Chelsea Hotel”. The oeuvre brings forth questions of what is real and what is imagined, especially as the characters, these cartoon-like figures, are treated with as much empathy as the true to life portraits of her favorite authors. In the former, full frontal poses convey dignity as the unknown go about their daily chores; the latter bring us face to face with the little known features of the famous. ‘Little’ Yity was the first character creation from Regine Kolle's animated film work. This new development in the artist's practice was the fruit of a residency at Villa Medici in Rome in 2001, and is one that has brought to life an important body of work.

Seven years separate the paintings, “Westpalms” (2000), and “Cloudy Highway” (2007). In both, roads span the width of the painting and lead from the foreground toward the distant horizon. “Westpalms” plays with the naïve; the road’s broken line divides a mirror image of palm trees and mountains. The composition of “Cloudy Highway” is sophisticated in comparison; the highway cuts a dramatic diagonal, taking over three quarters of the picture plane. Billowing ‘word balloon’ clouds invade the expressionist-style painting. The subject recalls a time spent in California and is also referencing of a number of memorable road-movies.

Perhaps painting is not Regine Kolle’s cause. However, it has become her quest. “Cloudy Highway” is one example of the testing and trying of the formal limits of painting, the pursuit of which cause disparate styles to collide and co-exist. In a similar way, Kolle hangs diverse works side by side, qualifying them as "families” rather than ‘installations’. Incongruous subjects juxtapose: highways and back streets, cemeteries and swimming pools. The word “equivalence” was aptly chosen to describe her work, as in her practice, all is equivalent or equal. Thus her paintings achieve something rare in contemporary art; they manage to be witty and wise.

There is a marked contrast between this current selection and your earlier work, which was primarily photography. What could explain such a change of course?
The evolution of my practice from photography to “digital creation” (silkscreen printing or sculpture) was mainly due to a life-changing event, an illness that more than likely changed my relationship to the world and more particularly to the tangible world. I no longer consider myself a photographer, but rather an artist using the photographic image as one of my materials, drawing from my own archives as well as those in the public domain.

A gradual development towards abstraction seems evident in the work. Do you envision navigating between figuration and abstraction, or are you striving towards dissolution of all representation?
My work is about images and objects that have become nonfunctional. Through an accumulation of signs, motifs, filters, materials and techniques, digital and manual intervention and repurposing machines, the original images are cancelled out. Rather than abstraction, I would call it ‘disfigurement’, the loss of definition (in all the senses of the term) through a swallowing up more than through dissolution.

The sculpture, ‘Untitled,’ with rubber and chair is quite different than the other works I have chosen for the exhibition. Would you elaborate more on this piece?
In fact, this piece builds on the same idea as the others: the loss of definition of the original image, the covering with the black material, the neutralization of the sign. The difference is that it’s an object which loses its original function – in this case its function as a chair – and not a photograph. A short time ago, I started to introduce three-dimensional pieces which converse with the silk screens and I think I will continue to explore in this direction.

Recently you co-curated an exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia. What was the idea behind the theme, 'Winter or the Deluge' and how did your two silkscreen works fit into the theme?
The exhibition was above all an opportunity to affirm the desire to work together with artists on projects. On this particular occasion Rada Boukova and Thomas Fontaine and ten guest artists worked in a type of unilateral structure that differs from the classic curatorial schema, which is more institutional or market orientated. The exhibition title, 'Winter or the Deluge,' is the name of a painting by Nicolas Poussin. It was the starting point for a loose, contemporary transposition of the idea or concept of landscape with all the possibilities that such an incongruous title may conjure up-- somewhere between the banal, the uninspired and the grandiose. The works presented at Galerie Nathalie Obadia are essentially landscapes, regardless of how abstract they may seem.

How does the transition to non-representation affect the viewer’s reading of the subject in your work?
The principles of accumulation, blending and recomposition, whether this is about symbols and/or matter, allows me (and maybe the viewer) to think about a world that is emancipating itself from its origins.

Could you tell me how you see your work in general corresponding to this particular time in which we live?
It seems to me that everything is evolving together. The most important changes, in my opinion, are in fact in the way the world is split up; obviously in physics, with its universe of particles, but also in a lot of other fields. Music for example, which for a long time (in Europe in any case) was organized around semitones, today has a spectrum that is incredibly rich in subdivisions, and between two notes, there is an infinity of possibilities. The same is true in art. The spectrum of materials, techniques and possible ways of working is really broad, and you can pick out nano-elements of all sorts and put them back together in a configuration where the original has disappeared.

Is there something particular about living and working in Paris that informs your practice?
I don't think so. It is true that the materials and machines I use might reflect an urban context but not specifically Paris.

Is there a notion of politics in your work?
That's one possible interpretation.