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43 rue Saint-Georges
75009 Paris
France
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About
DNL gallery is a new gallery based in Paris, opening in March 2024. It is positioned as an exhibition, exploration and prospecting space dedicated to architecture in all its components.
The gallery aims to highlight the close links between the visual arts, media, contemporary culture and architecture, promoting their encounter and presenting their interactions. This is neither a confrontation between disciplines nor an eclectic selection, but a synthesis, a perspective that raises many questions. How do we select the pieces to be exhibited? Should the creative process be broken down? And what about references? Above all, how can architecture be collected?
To achieve its mission of encouraging these questions and fostering a better understanding of the built environment, the gallery will produce original works solicited from a new generation of architects, as well as selecting older works. While the most contemporary initiatives are exhibited, heritage and the history of architecture are by no means neglected.
The gallery is located in an apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, offering an unusual setting for presenting architecture. An office, a living room and a storeroom will now be transformed into exhibition spaces to share architecture, its details, fragments and concepts with a specialised public, while seeking to reach as wide an audience as possible.
DNL stands for Double Neon Light, the leitmotif of exhibition spaces.
16 March – 19 May 2024
Barely visible, buried beneath ornaments, the fireplace is a recurring subject in the series of interiors fixed by Eugène Atget's lens at the turn of the twentieth century. The mantelpiece is the heightened embodiment of the comfort made possible by the mechanics of the Haussmannian building's flues, and of the necessary delimitation of the hearth: the intimacy of the apartment.
Heating systems have evolved to the point of rendering fireplaces obsolete, yet they remain a guarantor of Haussmannian character — and therefore of a property's market value. With that same market in view, it is not uncommon for them to be removed along with their flues in order to "reclaim" half a square metre to a square metre of floor area. Such frequent alterations feed a thriving second-hand market, one that reflects how few models and dimensions these ready-to-fit elements ever came in. Nineteenth-century marble workers flooded France with these kit surrounds by the wagonload, standardising catalogues around a limited set of stock models — utilitarian syntheses of historical styles, among them the modillion type.
The ambivalent status of these standardised ornaments — architectural archetype or decorative product, indispensable figure of the domestic landscape or cumbersome antique — is inevitably up for debate in interior renovation projects. What position should architects take when faced with these situations? What is the value of this ornamented interface once the flues are sealed and it is stripped of all function? What place should be given to the many pieces removed?
Among these sheet-stone facings, the corbels and modillions stand apart: more heavily worked and more massive, as their projecting load-bearing function requires.
The generic character of the collected fragments allows us to work them into a series of prototype three-dimensional assemblies that temporarily occupy the domestic space of the gallery: stone reduced to ornamental motif is used here for its structural capacity, and the contoured form becomes a piece of framing, abstracted from its original orientation.
Since 2020, Amor Immeuble has explored the potential of building elements brought to light across a variety of territories. This approach has been carried out through several projects and residencies. From May to July 2022, a residency at the Centre international d'art et du paysage de Vassivière gave the practice the opportunity to explore the constructive history of Aldo Rossi and Xavier Fabre's building. In October 2022, an invitation from DRAC Franche-Comté enabled work on a former gravel pit in the Val de Saône. In April 2023, for Milan Design Week, Amor Immeuble was invited by studio (ab)Normal to present a research project on Hainaut bluestone in the group exhibition Europelago. In December 2023, its research project on the ground of the city, Pavés dormants, developed with designer Anna Saint Pierre, won the Faire Paris open call organised by the Pavillon de l'Arsenal.