CUTLOG at the Bourse du Commerce

Megan Fernandes writing for VINGT PARIS

During "FIAC week" The Bourse du Commerce hosted Cutlog, a new contemporary art fair where thirty selected independent galleries featured their most promising emerging artists - see more photos. The participating countries included France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, and one small Brooklyn based gallery. The galleries arranged their artwork on a labyrinth of foamboards which snaked beneath the early 19th century iron and glass domed ceiling.  On Friday, October 23rd, a jury of professionals awarded the prize of the fair to Barcelona artists Patricia Gómez and María Jesús Gónzalez from the Raiña Lupa Gallery. The arresting photographs of textured fabrics and graffitied walls in an abandoned prison won Gómez and Gónzalez not only the 2024 competition, but also a heavily sought invitation to Cutlog 2024. Two German galleries had particularly compelling work. One project was a series of highly stylized aerial shots of cruise and cargo ships from Hengevoss-Dürkop, Germany.  The other displayed work by artist, Floriana Gavriel, who used narrative photography to document the devastating effects of genetically modified cotton in the Vidarbha region of Central India (Galerie Gavriel, Germany).

If you'd like to check out the best that Paris has to offer, amongst the most impressive were Spree and Galerie Pascaline Mulliez. Spree’s most memorable photographs were a series from a French artist, Patrick Messina.  Working with height and scale, he colorfully lit and symmetrically arranged the seats and tables of empty eerie conference rooms in Korea. Messina is best known for his Lambda prints of American urban infrastructures and bustling city life manipulated to look like artificial miniature models.
 
Galerie Pascaline Muilliez featured work from Polish artist, Krysztof Środa, whose photographs of maps, arcades, balconies, doorways, window television sets and beauty advertisements in regions of Eastern Europe were among the most imaginative of Cutlog’s exhibition. Described as first and foremost a philosopher, Środa has a PhD in Husserlian phenomenology, but abandoned his academic pursuits to translate shampoo bottle labels, and later to dedicate time to travel and photography.