Global Pool Club, an exhibition by the artists of Poush, initiated by Jesse Wallace et Thomas Collinet (First Laid), to be discovered from January 28 to March 12.

Artistic direction: Raphaël and Laurent Giannesini (Gia Viewing Room).

With a scenographic intervention made out of fitted carpet by Sylvain Debelfort et Agathe Pollet.

With artists Hugo Avigo, Thomas Ballouhey, Julia Borderie, Apollinaria Broche, Victor Class, Pierre Clement, Thomas Collinet, Sylvain Debelfort, Cyril Debon, Marouane Dekaoui, Émilie Ferré, First Laid, John Fou, Max Fouchy, Marion Gély, Charles Hascoët, Michel Jocaille, Livia Johann, Olivier Jonvaux, Vika Kosheleva, Amalia Laurent, Eloïse Le Gallo, Prosper Legault, Anouck Lemarquis, Anaïs Leroy, Juan Ignacio Lopez, Thibault Lucas, Garance Matton, Théodore Melchior, Macha Pangilinan, Raphaëlle Peria, Lucile Piketty, Agathe Pollet, Brieuc Remy, Clara Rivault, Léa Rivera, Jack Rothert Garcia, Rotolux, Ugo Schildge, Erwan Sene, Chloé Silbano, Maxime Testu, Sarah Valente, Louis Verret, Vincent Volkart, Jesse Wallace, Clémence Warnier and Xolo Cuintle.

A litter of five perfectly round eggs, freshly incubated, is stored in the triangle of an indecisive arrow, pointing its three corners towards two angles and a side of the rectangle that surrounds it. Nothing is settled, everything is already in a state of tension. The attention of those in attendance slowly turns away from the contingencies of the world. The atmosphere is grimy. The air sticks to your skin, the glasses stick to the coasters, the knees to the tables and the smoke to the light of the chandeliers. And yet, somewhere in the frozen time of this Prohibition-style night, the balls are rolling.

Against the background of a mathematical friction of chalk and cues, the game unexpectedly turns into a pictorial composition. Between the four cushions, like the edges of a frame, stretches the velvet surface of a monochrome – no one in the Global Pool Club would dispute its relevance. The balls are broken up and things happen. At the intersection of precision and chance, a few metaphysical hopes resurface secretly. In life and in art, as Pascal would have said, men spend their time following a ball and a hare. In the green of the warren, everyone is looking for their own hole.

The game of pool is an immersion into a bidimensional world where, like in painting, anything can happen. A perimeter of encounters, an erudite form of entertainment, a competition of technicality, it also represents an inexhaustible source of metaphors and puns. Billiards is a boxing ring for the upper class and a golf green for the lower class. Between The Hustler and Some Like It Hot, the Global Pool Club is an inclusive establishment where villains, artists, entertainers of all kinds, trading partners of all stripes, amateurs, masters, neophytes, players of all classes, males and even females, as Degas said, can tickle each other’s ball. The cannon, in its true sense, is primarily an art of the happy collision.

With the bistro table, the pool table still holds an essential place in today’s artistic conversation, like the true workbench of aesthetic constructions and the prologue to any studio work. In certain studios and in certain conversations, at least. This is why First Laid and the Giannesini brothers have chosen to invent a dive bar that could also be an exhibition, a living space for the daytime and the nighttime, a bar, a cabaret, a game room and a restaurant.

Global Pool Club was created with the complicity of many residents and outside artists. This collective finale is the result of a two-year cohabitation at Poush. Two years that have been like a long game of pool, made of encounters, collisions of ideas and desires, chain reactions. A cannon of wishes and friendships, livened up by a few drinks, which we can now literally continue inside the Global Pool Club.

– Marilou Thiébault