BOTZARIS

BOTZARIS
BOTZARIS houses the Parisian chapter of artist Sara Naim's life.
It consists of the standard constituents of a home as well as an artist studio, a gallery space and the artist’s archives.

WHITE CUBE
BOTZARIS was designed as an extension of Brian O’Doherty’s white cube theory beyond the single realm of the art gallery.
The white-cubeness of the gallery space at the center of the apartment leaks out and contaminates all other rooms.
“The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life.”
Brian O’Doherty - Inside the White Cube : The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley, USA, 2000

PROGRAM
The 90m2 gallery-apartment is located in a post-war late modernist building facing the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in the XIXth arrondissement of Paris.
The artist’s initial demand was to live in a place that reflects the core of her conception of art consisting in challenging the sole notion of borders in realms as diverse as cells, countries, sensations and now a home.
The programmatic elements are: the artist’s studio, a private gallery space and archives as well as the standard constituents of a home: a living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms and bathrooms.
Architect and Artist Ariel Claudet helped Artist Sara Naim to design a space that homes all aspects of her inside life and Dechelette Architecture produced the drawing set and followed up the construction.

WALLS
The white walls of the gallery space unfold and stretch out to all rooms. Sara Naim’s artworks break out from the studio and spread out freely on the wall surface of the entire home.

WINDOWS
All-white joineries, categorize windows not as views towards the outside but as two dimensional images hung on the wall on the same terms as Naim’s artworks.
Even though orientation towards the Eiffel Tower is accidental, what was done to the inside ‘artifies’ this iconic view and includes it in the broad composition: the exhibition.

FLOOR
The pewter gray satin floor has been developed so its color contrasts clearly with walls and marks the lower surface onto which colored objects and people stand as sculptural elements.
So the clicks of high heels wandering around the gallery space and the swooshes of slippers crawling towards the bathroom at night are perfectly satisfactory to the ears, the poured quartz-reinforced cement floor has a different number of resin paint coats in each room. This reflects in the barely noticeable difference between two shades of gray at each threshold.

FURNITURE
There are two types of furniture in Sara Naim’s Botzaris home, each type is part of a different realm.
Basic furniture and fixtures are part of the realm of the gallery along with white walls, the floor and the ceiling.
Leaning on white walls or free standing on the satin gray floor, sculptural furniture take part in the general composition of the permanent exhibition.

PEOPLE
A toilet bowl, a plastic bag lying on the floor, a plant, etc. anything within the space of the white-cubed home is artified and people are not spared.
Inhabitants living their lives, guests tasting the owner’s latest discovery in natural wine and collectors visiting the studio, all of them are performers taking part in the temporary exhibition.
However any person inside the white cube is free to step out from his performer status and become an eye, a spectator of the ongoing show.

STUDIO
Naim’s creative process is different to the one of a modernist painter whose shapes are the result of a physical process of research. Her pieces are shaped in the long term in the imaginary world without having any material reflection into our physical realm. It is only once matured in her mind that they become tangible in a sharp and fast process in the studio space.
In O’Doherty’s White Cube, Francis Bacon’s studio is qualified as a ‘belly’. Naim’s work being developed in a constant interior process, her belly would be where she spends her life, therefore her entire home and the studio would only be the threshold where the art steps out into the physical realm.
Sara Naim’s Botzaris home stands as the statement that the artist is in a constant creative process. The studio is not the boiling place dedicated to the vibrant creation of art mystified by O’Doherty anymore ; Sara Naim’s mind is her womb and her studio the delivery room.
Limits between the archives, studio and gallery space and the rest of the home have been carefully blurred, however not denied. As previously mentioned, the floor is a continuous surface, but each room has a different shade of gray, swinging doors are perfectly flush with walls, but anodized-aluminum-paneled door jambs contrast with the whiteness of walls.
As an offspring bearing its parents’ genes, Naim’s works bear the aura of the apartment-gallery. When abstracted from the exhibition composition of the Botzaris apartment, the aura of the apartment-belly will always emanate from a Naim’s pieces.

ART
The artworks shown in the photographs are part of Naim’s ‘Form Theory’ series.
This series tends to extend Naim’s recurring question: “If borders do not exist on a cellular scale, can we define borders on a macro scale?” to the following: “if felt sensations within can be formally externalized, does that break the body’s border?”
During various Vipassana meditation sessions that the artist staged and guided, the sitters were asked to draw their sensations, which she later selected, magnified, printed and shaped to inform her photographic sculptures.
These feelings, once expressed from the interior world into the sensitive world become tangible sensations.

MERGER
Naim’s art as well as her home are places where borders and limits are proven sparse. Everything that lives or stands within their realm expands and radiates resulting in one great merger of matter, color, sensations and thoughts.