Tobacco Smuggling - Exhibitions

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Clément Rodzielski’s second solo exhibition with the gallery opening on 20thNovember in London.

Clément Rodzielski’s work is marked by an attention to images, their modes of material and immaterial appearance as well as the uses and exchanges they depend on. With different gestures (printing, isolating, blowing up, cutting up, doubling up, spray painting) he explores the different possibilities of ready-mades as signifiers. His appropriations often involve overlooked or forgotten objects that no longer have a connection with their producer or owner.

Rodzielski’s exhibition draws upon counterfeit tobacco as a found material, reorganizing its circulation to build a fiction around the activity of painting. Carried underneath the large coats of its sellers on the streets of Parisian neighbourhood Barbès, fake tobacco negotiates its legal and economic status while being constantly exchanged. Trapped inside each of the works in the exhibition, the material of tobacco continues its constant flow of motion into painting, changing its use value entirely.

The display will feature a prolific set of drawings that are in direct relation to the paintings’ process of production. The paintings follow a pre-ordained palette of colours given by the different shades of tobacco itself, except for one colour that is arbitrarily chosen. Brushstrokes are dispersed throughout the wooden support, in the fashion of an interior pattern from a Nabis’ private setting, where painting is hidden or dissolved as part of a background decoration. The drawings, on the other hand, emerge as the paintings’ counterpart, dictating their own array of colours and revealing their layered process. Both mediums adopt a Trojan horse strategy; while at first look they seem to follow the conventions of abstraction, they hide painting’s potential function as a vehicle.