FELICE VARINI
LA VILLETTE EN SUITES

Between April 15th and September 13th 2015, La Villette is delighted to be welcoming the artist Felice Varini.

Four site-specific artworks have been created in the Grande Halle and in the Paul-Delouvrier Pavilion.

For over thirty years, Felice Varini has been creating artworks positioned at the frontiers of pictorial creation.

Urban landscapes and enclosed spaces along with their architecture form the basis of these geometric compositions in space.

There is nothing quite like his work – his striking creations invite the visitor to take a vertiginous drift through a variety of vantage points in an artistic experience that disrupts the order of the fixed perspective.

Working from his plotted spatial data, he defines a vantage point around which he creates the artwork.  Whilst the painted shape is coherent when the viewer is positioned at that one point, an infinity of viewpoints then take shape when the viewer shifts, as the painted shape encounters the space around it.

Every one of these viewpoints make up the totality of Felice Varini’s work, and it is this dynamic play between composition and decomposition that makes his contemporary creations so thrillingly alive.

 The creations of Felice Varini at La Villette

East Gallery of the Grande Halle: Felice Varini paints Arcs of a circle on a diagonal.

–Free entry daily

Felice Varini takes this space with metallic arches so emblematic of 19th Century architecture and brings to us a reading of the space that is both contemplative and dynamic. Running alongside an expanse of green, this covered Gallery in the Grande Halle has for some time been a space much loved by people taking a stroll, and from it Felice Varini extracts movement, colour and rhythm.

Bursts of paint radiate outwards within the Gallery and all the way out to the Cité de la musique - Philharmonie de Paris 2 building.

 Paul-Delouvrier pavilion: four site-specific artworks

–Wednesday to Sunday 2pm to 7pm, free entry

Throughout the building’s 1 000 m² of white marble that features three core geometric shapes, Felice Varini brings us three works_: Fourteen triangles pierced/leaning, Red yellow black blue between discs and trapeziums and Seven squares for seven columns.

Each artwork plays with its own singularity and the perspective it assumes in a space that is shared with other artworks. For each hall, a work projects itself into the distance in the other halls without sacrificing any of the autonomy that defines it.

 Entrance hall of the Grande Halle: a space to document the work of Felice Varini.

– From 17th June Wednesdays to Sundays 2pm to 7pm, free entry

A fresco composed of twenty-five photographic reproductions visible as a watermark from the hall’s inside and outside, and on a projection video that plunges the viewer into the artist’s work of the past decade.

 Biography

Felice Varini was born in 1952 in Locarno Switzerland, and lives in Paris.

Alongside geometric abstract art, he evolved his style in the direction of an art that exists in space. Since the 80s he has worked towards an artform that is conceptual and rigorous in which the fundamental tenets of painted works are questioned including scale and volume, figures and media, abstraction and constructed realities and colours and effects.

It was during the course of these explorations that he happened upon an interrogation of how we represent things, drawing on perspectivist effects that can still be discerned in his works today, as well as an interrogation of their meaning.

Free exhibition from 15th April to 13th September 2015

Metro M5 Porte de Pantin Tramway T3b Porte de Pantin - Parc de la Villette Bus 75, 151 Porte de Pantin - Parc de la Villette

Information: 01 40 03 75 75 / lavillette.com