Tobias Madison's: Yes I Can: 2008

TI can't afford, right this minute a Lucio Fontana slash painting but he can dream about the latest pieces by Tobias Madison, whose solo show "Yes I Can" shows at the agnes b's Galarie du Jour until July 19th in Paris. Its a very clever collection of ideas ranging from photography to installations.

Conceptual high rise tennis anyone? Image via vvork.com

Post Wimbledon...Pre-US Open...TI lives for this installation !

Tatiana Trouve at the Pompidou is crucial to see !

TI recommends that the fashion flock as they migrate through Paris for the Men's shows and the Coutures that they make a stop-off at the Pompidou to cruise Tatiana Trouve's new show. Trouvé's work has been described as "site-specific constructions of mundane objects, plexiglass, metal, wood, drawings and sculptures recalls the cold halls of bureaucracy, the fitness studios, hairdresser salons, cloak rooms or torture chambers." TI's antennae just stood up on high!

DUM DUM 2008: Pierre Labat

The simplest gesture and you've change your space. Now I'm intrigued by the work of Pierre Labat.

Eric Stephany: Out Of Date/Material-2003-2006

"everyones sayin Paris is just no longer the city of life and that we have to deal with London now
and that Paris' becomin like a museum !! no more updates !! only history !!"

Urtica: 2004: David Balula

"Living For" is one of those slangs I picked up from the kids so I've decided to make it a new section on TI. The kick off thing I live for right this second is a discovery I made today. His name is David Balula and he is " un Chanteur Folk, songwriter, artiste conceptuel, expérimentateur expérimenté, DAVID BALULA est tout ça à la fois," as they say . I love his visual wit and his multidisciplinary dexterity. It is good to be many things in the early 21st century.

The Palais de Tokyo pushes the borders yet again in "Superdome"

While in Paris for the upcoming Men's shows , everybody should take a day off to scan Marc-Olivier Wahler's Superdome , at Palais de Tokyo, my favorite contemporary "museum" in the world right this minute. I can't best the press release as follows :

The Superdome is a mythical stadium: built in 1975 in New Orleans (Louisiana), it has hosted numerous Super Bowls (the American football championship’s final), a Rolling Stones concert, Pope John Paul II, the Republican Convention and refugees of Hurricane Katrina. Paradoxical, the Superdome builds a bridge between the greatest entertainment and the greatest anguish. Inspired by its additional and schizophrenic logic, mixing "I can get no satisfaction" AND "Our Father in heaven", Marc-Olivier Wahler puts forward SUPERDOME: a new session composed of five solo exhibitions balancing between entertainment and desolation, decibels and prayers, high-tech and chaos, as the continuation of a program testing the notion of the elasticity of art which started at the Palais de Tokyo with Five Billion Years.

I can't wait to see the exhibit with the massive section of museum floor, cut out and hung suspended from the ceiling. And you thought sending a crack through the middle of a perfect poured concrete floor was transgressive !

David Claerbout : Shadow Play: 2005

TI is intensely obsessed with the art of David Claerbout at this point in time. Claerbout's work is highlighted by video installations that play with the idea of time passing and time captured by the still and video camera. As Stephan Berg explains in the monograph " Claerbout removes from the photograph a piece of its static quality that is oriented towards fixation and takes from films its impulse of movement". In other words we are treated to photographs that move unexpectedly and films that freeze for significant periods of time. What I love about the work is the detail and the texture of the images. It is as if a dark shadow has fallen on the banal scenes of the modern landscape. An example of the rigor and technical complexity of Claerbout's work is in my favorite art work of his ,"Shadow Piece" . That black and white video, inspired by an archival 50's photograph, features a series of figures (in this frame a man and a woman) vainly attempting to open the doors of a modernist house. Its very Antonioni film meets Vogue Italia spread if I were to be simplistic about it. But in his depictions of a Bauhaus world that has been sold to us as an ideal of geometric perfection, Claerbout captures the frustration and sense of futility that comes with that world. The tension thereof drives to me adore David Claerbout. The book too is beautiful. Black, gray, sepia with the pages edged in black. Must buy!

KATHERINE BERNHARDT 's PARIS Appointment

Miss Katherine Bernhardt is having an opening in Paris this weekend for her new show titled "Drunken Hot Girls" . That makes it a must-do rendezvous, no. Voila the details.

KATHERINE BERNHARDT 's PARIS Appointment

Matali Crassett is HOT!

Paris Fashion Week, Sept 30th - Oct 8th. Everybody waiting with bated breath to see what directional swerve Nicholas might pull onto the now hallowed runway of Balenciaga. By the weekend the mob will be dying for the Vuitton to come . But The Imagist will be playing hooky from all fashion obligations on the evening of Oct 6th which is Nuit Blanche (White Night) when every gallery and museum is open all night and all of Paris (from medevial churches to blank office building walls) turns into one massive art zone. Last year was a blast and destination No 1 for us in 07 will be the Peter Halley/Matali Crasset collaboration at Thaddeus Ropac. We're mad for Matali. We think she's sooo hot in a medevial goth Jeanne D'arc way and if The Imagist were a print publication she'd be the cover (after MIA on Issue 1) . Crasset's work is not severe though. Its pop plastic but not stale 60's. Can't wait to see it mashed up with Halley!

Peter Halley:Conspiracy Theory Acrylic, pearlescent and metallic acrylic and roll-a-tex on canvas2002