Salon du Dessin, originally uploaded by pablogt.

Paris is specially nice today… the Contemporary Drawing Art fair opened yesterday and I visited it today to give you guys a little taste… once again I got in for free with my Maex press pass… take a look a the slide show here, more on the Salon du Dessin Contemporain here

Take a look a the artwork of a good friend of mine Laurent de Raucourt:

Yesterday I went to a cool Vernisage of a group show called Corps à Faire at Galerie Jeune Creation were I saw a cool performance I did not understand where the shapes reminded me of an old Max Ernst painting.

The poetics of an empty landscape. I am happy to congratulate my good friend Guillaume Lemarchal for being awarded the HSBC grant. He is currently showing at Galerie Michèle Chomette and you can see a couple of shoots of his show here below. more on him here

Check out the art work of Ivan Navarro currently showing at Galerie Daniel Templon.

Checkout the Tate’s podcast of Jeremy Deller where he talks about the two works that helped him win the Turner Prize in 2004, “a wall drawing called The History of the World, a sort of mad-professor’s mind-map of the history of Britain through music; and a film called Memory Bucket that he made during a visit to Texas and which explores American paranoia”. check out other Tate shots videos here

If violence was this light… take a look here

©Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris.

Recently, I saw an exhibition by Shirin Neshat at the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont where we can see two amazing new color cinematographic videos entitled Munis and Faezeh, these two videos were of an enigmatic beauty rare in contemporary art today. Those of you who saw her work at MAM may remember how most of her videos were black and white, youtube her here if you want to catch a few reminders, but these new color films are color corrected in such a fine and delicate way that I was surprised and immersed in it… like a boy with cartoons… The colors were soft pastels colors. The subject matter of the two videos are based on Women Without Men, a novel by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipu depicting the perception of a young Iranian woman during the summer of 1953 in Iran’s political unrest and a psychological breakdown of a Muslim woman following a sexual assault. The two videos are stuning and remain in my mind even a few days later. I recommend you try to see this recent works when it comes to your town.

The new large scale photographs, some seen here below, which mainly feature portraits of middle east men and women have been hand tagged in Persian calligraphy. The large images take a position of a face to face confrontation with a culture that remains covered by the Media and rarely seen in contemporary art. I liked them!

Take a look at the work of this painter and performance artist Benoît Pingeot.

youtube one of his performances here

©copyright ADAGP

Take a look at work of Nathalie Bibougou, an artist I have met here in paris that paints portraits of Melvin Van Peebles and other interesting subjects.