Houdini: Denis Savary

Denis Savary's work is rooted in two matrix activities, drawing and video, two nomadic practices whose results could fit into two shoeboxes. The exhibition is based on the idea of enlarging these "boxes" to the size of the two large rooms on the first floor. These two opposing rooms function as two hemispheres, hot and cold, rural and stellar, domestic and wild. In one, eight video channels project a series of films in which the artist records his environment without staging. Visitors find themselves caught up in a cacophonous panorama of modest incongruities, where balls of smashed glass, frozen fireworks, punctuate the space like oracular beacons. In the other, Savary's drawings are displayed in wallpaper. These tiny drawings, printed in cyan, give the room a polar tone. They form a narrative landscape in the background of the surreal encounter between dancing Mahaha and freshly-landed Mae.

The magical effect of plunging into a box of images out of proportion provides a key to the exhibition's title. Houdini, champion of escape, plays with scale and space. The rooms oscillate between evoking an outside and an inside, city lights and crematorium flames, a giant game board and dogs asleep on the wall. As in a hackneyed tarot deck, the fates of Savary's works intersect, building a house of cards where postures are reversed to generate an uncertain narrative, a disturbance about the state of things.

Denis Savary was born in Granges-Marnand (VD) in 1981. He lives and works in London and Geneva.

For further information, please visit the website:

https://www.mbac.ch/exhibitions/denis-savary-houdini/