Stephen Dean

Galerie Xippas, 2000-01-01. Paperback. Very Good. Galerie Xippas [Published Date: 2000]. Soft cover, [44] pp (unnumbered). Text in French and English. Published to accompany an exhibition held at Galerie Xippas, Paris, May 4-June 10, 2000. In very good condition. Illustrated paper covers with French flaps have light bumping to edges and corners and light overall scuffing. Binding tight. Marcel Sitcoske Gallery label affixed to front free end paper. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Contents include essay by Olivier Kaeppelin in both French and English (translated at back); full color illustrations of exhibited pieces, solo and group exhibitions, public collections, commissions. [Excerpt from essay "Grasping Surfaces"] It all begins with a passion for observation, a way of exiting the conversation, forgetting the headlines of the day or the intricacies of street names, understanding nothing more and leaving what the world usually writes behind. Silence is a passion, because it allows you to see - that is, to keep watch, to paradoxically penetrate or mingle with what you observe. Perception is a tool for thinking, for appropriating and transforming the material of the gaze. For those who use it, who give themselves over to it, it becomes a way of thinking that is incomparable with other modes of interpretation, for it establishes us as actors within a relation, an irremediably singular relation to the world. To place your bets on "seeing" is a way to clear the terrain, to attain solitude, in order to explore it. It all begins, for Stephen Dean, with a passion for everyday life. The life of the city, of wandering, of objects that circulate, newspapers that are opened by thousands of early-morning hands. In Brooklyn where he lives as in all the other cities that he crosses, inside New York or elsewhere -for Stephen Dean travels in order to satisfy this passion to "see," to live out this gap far from language, which sets off the experience of sight: sight that permits the dazzling encounter with beings or things, a key rack, for instance. It all begins with a passion for painting, the passion for the act of laying material down on a surface in order to transform it, to give it a new meaning. This power to bind and unbind, to engender relations from one space to another, in a word, to impose a rhythm which by its capacities of modification becomes a vision of the world. Painting, in his work, is color, to such a degree that it can abandon any pictorial substance, move through photography, installations, and still fully remain painting,thanks to the "act of color" projected upon the real and its objects. It is not a matter of the medium or the pictorial form, but rather a principle of coloration and of habitation in the world; not a matter of place but of circulation from one place to the next. It settles, gathers, passes, touching everything with its metamorphoses, and depositing in each work the unanswered question of its definition. Stephen Dean experiments with the relations between everyday life and vision. His work is the story of an appropriation of statements and measuring systems of reality (words, lexicons, graphics, abacuses, books) by an act that dispossesses them of their powers, to employ them for other ends. Through this play, this fluctuation of meaning, this displacement, they become loci of energy nourished by a sensual, transformative expenditure which is at the heart of his painting., "the body" of this vision at work, the body in action that he stages so masterfully in an immense "photograph-painting-sculpture", maliciously entitled Off Hand. What do we see? . . .