Introduction

At the Parc Saint Léger, Gabriel Kuri presents a significant new collection of sculptures conceived for the space and shown in various locations on site. His work brings together everyday objects, especially materials relating to consumption, with found elements, both natural and man-made. A recurrent choice of objects – receipts, plastic bags, stones–and issues such as consumerism, economics and temporality, have forged a complex vocabulary that, while recognizable, is constantly reformulated in relation to each context.

Kuri’s artistic practice refers to the formal language of modernist sculpture and their materials (such as marble, metal, stone, and cement) but also highlights the unexamined correspondences with the way in which visual data is presented, for example in graphs, or pie charts. His large marble works for example engage with the language of minimalism but add refuse from everyday life, such as cans, cigarette buts or ticket stubs.

The artist takes discarded objects seriously, mining their forms and their presence as indicators of previous actions (a ticket indicating the time spent waiting in line, a sales receipt the commercial transaction, or the empty drink cans, a person consuming its contents) and bringing to light a certain solitariness of their state.

The exhibition bottled water branded water takes the site of the Parc Saint Léger and its history as its starting point. The title of the exhibition makes reference to the economic activity that brought life to the center up until the 1970s – that of a thermal spa. As the neologism of the title suggests, the exhibition implicitly evokes the commercialization of water. In this context, the artist presents us with a new series of sculptures that draws a path between interior and exterior spaces, both within the exhibition space but also in two sets of architectural ruins from the thermal era: the Pavillon des Sources and the Promenoir. Under the Promenoir, Kuri has installed a tubular metal sculpture that is deployed over twenty meters, with a myriad of twists and turns, in a long curvaceous line. These gentle shapes contrast with the harshness of the anti-pigeon spikes covering it, while small coins –suggesting a wishing well – echo the site's past.

In the Pavillon des Sources, an architectural structure typical of the late 19th century that served as a stall for selling the water and its byproducts, Kuri presents a set of sculptures, of office furniture (photocopier, storage closets, folders) covered in layers of tar as though with a second skin. The result is disturbing in a plastic sense, since it is both evocative – the shapes are recognizable – yet strangely mutable. What these objects lose in terms of functionality, the sculptor's action allows them to gain in formal and plastic qualities. Adjacent to this ensemble, a series of chrome paper-serviette distributors completes the set.

As a further reference to the economic stakes of the commercialization of natural resources, Gabriel Kuri created a publication to accompany the exhibition that shows a repertoire of images of various French brands of mineral water, photographed like commercial products, but with their bottles filled with a yellowish fluid provocatively entitled "undisclosed liquid."