Visiting the Paris art scene, a gallery titled No Name, featuring art in a show called “A Hundred Ways to Disappear,” proves to be anything but nondescript. An academic sense of art history, combined with innovative curation, left this reviewer wanting to know the details of how and why the selections were made. No Name director and curator Léo Panico was gracious enough to talk with me.
Kathleen Cullen: No Name gallery is in Paris, so let’s start with an overview of the program and the focus of the gallery to familiarize our Culture Catch readers. Also, please describe your role and why you decided to add the curation of this show?
Léo Panico: No Name is a project space founded by the art advisor Patricia Marshall in 2022 with the idea of inviting artists, critics collector and curators to collaborate with us on curating shows, to see what the dialogue between our advisory perspective could be, leaning on the post conceptual and minimalist side of contemporary art, and the one from other professional from the artworld. It requires from both sides–us and our guests–a true desire to collaborate. We, for instance, worked with the Mexican-based artist Dario Escobar, the curator Daniel Birnbaum, the movie producer Jacqui Davies, and the French art critic Armelle Leturcq.
Most of the artists exhibited have rarely been shown in France; we generally collaborate with foreign galleries, allowing their artists to reach a new audience.
This exhibition is a turning point as it is the first we're doing without inviting someone as co-curator. I wanted to work for a long time on the theme of absence and disappearance as a tempting response to the overabundance of images and words surrounding us. Absence as a refusal, a soft resistance where what is suggested prevails over what is given, the part prevailing over the whole.
KC: You use this quote to open up the information about the show. What does it reference? Did the quote help inspire you, or was it a discovery after you arrived at the theme?
“To look at what you wouldn’t look at, to hear what you wouldn’t listen to, to be attentive to the banal, to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary” - Paul Virilio
LP: It was a late discovery. This quote reflects on the possibility of looking at things differently, and being alert, more vigilant to what is around. It is hard not to overlook artworks, it requires effort and time from the viewers, especially when the works claim a multi-aspect, which is the case for some of the works in this show. This quote is also a reference to the concept of Inframince developed by Marcel Duchamp in the 1930s that questions the limits between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial, art and non-art. This notion is at the center of the exhibition.
KC: The show contains drawings, media, paintings, sculpture, and even audio. Please tell us how what is really such a wide array of styles all comes under the heading of “ A Hundred Ways To Disappear”?
LP: The idea was not to display an exhaustive list of all possible mediums, despite the title of the show! I was more interested in the possible connections and dialogue between each work. A number of them are related to language and its failure to seize our reality. For instance, Stefana McClure's works from the Films on Paper series, in which all the subtitles of a film are written by the artist on tracing paper and then superimposed and transferred onto a colored medium, result in two illegible white lines on a colored screen. A single image contains an entire film, whose content is unknown to us since all the letters are merging to create two almost continuous and unreadable lines. The meaning is here covered by a layering of words and sentences, as if our desires to know and to always add more could only result in an even more partial understanding of things. Pierre Allain’s sound piece compiles testimonies of people unsuccessfully trying to remember the name of a movie that traumatized them. The work is titled Tip of My Tongue and is about this feeling of lacking words and memory failing us. Nora Turato (image top) employs expressions or sentences that are now empty shells, as they have almost lost any meaning after being so overused.
KC: Since the very nature of art is to be seen, heard, or in some way experienced, disappearing seems almost like the last goal you would have. But when I see the transparent sculpture of Olga Balema, one is suddenly aware of the idea. Can you describe how the work of the artists featured is part of the curatorial choices?
LP: Olga Balema’s work was essential in the conception of the show. For me, her work is redefining what sculpture could be, in a very modest yet powerful way. The reflective and transparent surface of the work almost disappears in the space, but is inviting its environment into it at the same time. A single ray of light transforms it and then irradiates the room. The sculpture evolves throughout both the day and the visitor's displacement in the space. Olga’s work, among others in the show, explores these circumventing strategies, on how not to be upfront and give all the keys for their understanding at once.
KC: I think the show presents an almost ideal challenge to the viewers in that the work may not always be traditional, but at the same time, command attention no matter how subtle - would you agree? Is the challenge part of the point?
LP: I like this idea of a challenge when looking at an artwork. No Name is located in a bourgeois apartment and has a strong presence, with its marble chimneys and moldings on the walls. It requires one to have a significant curatorial perspective if you don’t want to fall into the showroom category.
Some of the works in the show have a substantial presence despite their minimalist and barely visible aspect, such as the large work by Michel Parmentier titled 5 avril 1991 and made of white pastel stripes on tracing paper. The result is a 300 cm x 300 cm (120 x 120 in.) piece manifesting its aura in the room while almost dissolving into the wall. Same with Latifa Echakhch’s Erratum 2004-2013 piece, made of 350 broken tea glasses shattered on the floor. The tea glasses are a symbol of Moroccan culture, the artist’s birth country. Here, lying on the floor, the glass shards form a cutting reflection on cultural heritage, colonialism, hospitality, and femininity.
Most of the works are playing with the notion of afterwardsness, as if what we were seeing were the traces and spectral shapes of past forms.
KC: You have really worked to educate the viewer with a variety of artists' perspectives. Can you elaborate on this with some examples from the show?
LP: This is what makes No Name an exciting project, bringing artists to an audience that is sometimes not familiar with them and that we want to support, in a space that is the opposite of a white cube.
We try to create dialogues between works from confirmed artists and younger ones. In the show, a video of Paulo Nazareth crossing the border between Mexico and the US while disappearing in the sand dunes is facing a sculpture by Matthias Odin. This sculpture consists of an assemblage of various objects related to the domestic sphere that he collected while living in precarious conditions. These works are two different perspectives on migration and roaming, one from one state to another, and one on what it is to be a stranger in your own city, both questioning notions of belonging and domesticity.
KC: Having seen the work in the show, I can attest to the impact of the theme. How has the finished product impacted you as the curator?
LP: I’m surprised to see how all the works continue to grow on you when you share the space with them for some time, and how new dialogues between them are emerging, thanks to the dialogue they allow with visitors. I now see how Berenice Olmedo’s work is related to the classical history of sculpture. The work we have in the show reminds me of a female torso from the Parthenon, Iris, the winged messenger goddess, now shown at the British Museum, but almost as a negative imprint of this classical torso.
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A Hundred Ways to Disappear
No Name
3 Place de l'Alma
75008 Paris
April 11 - June 24, 2025
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contact: leo@marshallfineart.com