Following the last year’s success, annual contemporary photography fair fotofever returns to the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, for its sixth edition. Featuring 150 emerging practitioners from 80 international galleries, the event continues to foreground new artists and foster a passion for collecting through several initatives. For example, one secton of the fair is devoted to eight developing galleries, including EXPOSED, France. Another area foregrounds exhibitors from East Asia, including AN INC, South Korea, displaying the work of Noh Suntag, who documents life in divded Korea. Fotofever also offers guided tours and a series of panel discussions with leading art market figures, providing new viewpoints.
Notably, the fair’s iconic “collector’s apartment”, created in partnership between sceneographer Elizabeth Leriche and furniture design brand Roche Bobois, returns this year. Doubled in size, the space creates a dialogue between design and art, showing works as they would appear in a home interior. Offering a sense of perspective, the venue encourages visitors to envisage themselves as collectors, embodying fotofever’s mission to inspire attendees to get involved in the ever-widening market. Further to this, the fair is also working alongside trade fair Salon de la Photo, with an exhibition which runs concurrently, hosting selected artworks priced under €1,000.
Contributors this year include French photographer Matthieu Venot (b. 1979), presented by Artistics, an online art platform. Venot’s abstracted compositions depict a utopian vision of the everyday. His geometric close-ups cause architectural structures to take on new meanings as they become detached from the whole. Using an unblemished blue sky as a backdrop, intercut by clean graphic lines and bright pastel shades, his optimistic compositions evoke the idylilic lifestyle of Americana from the suburbs of Brittany. In contrast, Romain Thiery (b. 1988) of Galerie 3032, Paris, captures a very different image of French architecture. His interest in forgotten heritage has led him to discover a multitude of abandoned yet majestic structures, littered with rubble and occupied only by nature. These absent spaces are renewed by his lens, giving life to an otherwise dormant vision of the past.
Both artists have featured in previous issues of Aesthetica Magazine.
Matthieu Venot: www.aestheticamagazine.com, Romain Thiery: www.aestheticamagazine.com.
Fotofever runs 10-12 November. Find out more: www.fotofever.com.
Credits:
1. Matthieu Venot, Sans Titre I, Ground Loop, 2015. © Matthieu Venot.
