Decrire le reste
dal 2/10/2008 al 6/12/2008
Segnalato da
2/10/2008
Decrire le reste
Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Anne Marie Jugnet + Alain Clairet. First large-scale monographic exhibition of this unclassifiable artist couple serving as a retrospective as well as a prospective show: with their screen paintings, their sculptures of clouds, their literary and poetic neons, their light installations and their print editions, they create a singular universe infused with Zen beauty. Commissioner: Enrico Lunghi. Moreover, Philippe Jacq at the Project Room.
Anne Marie Jugnet + Alain Clairet
Decrire le reste
Curator: Enrico Lunghi
Casino Luxembourg is proud to present the first comprehensive monographic retrospective of Anne Marie Jugnet + Alain Clairet. Using a wide range of media, the work of this unclassifiable artist couple investigates and questions the status of images. Among their series of works are paintings of the snow on TV screens, sculptures of clouds, photographs of the sky, painterly reproductions of desert and ocean maps, and literary or poetic neon signs. In most cases, their practice draws on actual yet hardly perceptible physical phenomena. Jugnet and Clairet thus direct their attention to the fringes of the image, the periphery, where information is at best scarce. Their analysis consistently triggers a reflection on the conditions of the emergence of images: “Our paintings deal with images. Our photographs deal with painting.” After they have been subjected to various technical treatments (photography, computer-manipulation etc.), the topics addressed in their works – the void, disappearance, and dematerialisation – take shape and become palpable.
The present exhibition provides visitors with the opportunity to discover both early and recent works, some of which are presented here for the first time. Light takes shape in a series of neon signs, the latest of which, Décrire le reste (Describing the Rest), has given its title to this retrospective, in which the viewer’s perception is ceaselessly put to the test. In the Sunsets series, the artists have for instance tried to reproduce, day after day, the lighting conditions of sunsets in a series of watercolour paintings reminiscent of liquefied skies. Their recent paintings of flying saucers and aliens inspired by TV documentaries push this conceptual approach further, which is characterised by a zen-like beauty and a distinct sense of humour.
As part of the exhibition, Casino Luxembourg and Galerie Serge Le Borgne in Paris, will publish the monographic catalogue Anne Marie Jugnet + Alain Clairet – Décrire le reste (210 x 260 mm, 250 p., with colour illustrations and texts by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anne Marie Jugnet + Alain Clairet, and Jean-Louis Schefer, French/English, ISBN 978-2-919893-74-2, 35 €). The book will be available in October 2008.
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Philippe Jacq
Project Room
Curated by Anne Kayser and Kevin Muhlen.
The French artist Philippe Jacq, born 1971 in Algeria and currently living in the South of France, makes no mystery of his conflicting relationship to identity in general, and his own in particular. One of his recent videos, the triptych Philippe Jacq, né à Oran en Algérie (Philippe Jacq, born in Oran in Algeria), is a striking illustration of the ambivalence that characterizes his work. It shows an affirmative gesture – the artist repeatedly writing down his name and place of birth – resulting in the negation of ‘identity’, which eventually gives way to three single colour fields – blue, white, and red – evoking the Tricolore, the French national flag.
For someone like Jacq, who originates from Algeria yet belongs to France and is therefore in constant search of his true identity, it seems hardly surprising that the affirmation of patriotic symbols should remain a sensitive matter. Jacq’s recent work, which draws on the artist’s childhood memories, questions the idea of national identity in a humoristic and playful manner. In Missiles patriotes (Patriotic Missiles), he thus transforms the emblems of various countries into weapons of mass destruction. In these deceitfully innocent colour drawings, an American hamburger, a Russian doll, a Chinese dragon, or a German eagle turn into rockets whose sole purpose is total annihilation. In the same vein, the French emblem, le coq, is represented as a bearer of destruction. But for all the symbolism, it remains essentially unclear whether spectators are witnessing a scathing critique or a tongue-in-cheek parody of national identity.
For his latest exhibition, Philippe Jacq has invested the Casino’s Project Room with yet another version of the French rooster, which, in the country’s collective consciousness, embodies the key values of rural France: pride, obstinacy, courage, and industriousness. Yet, conversely, the rooster also stands for insensitivity and arrogance, and despite his crown, looks somewhat grotesque. It is this inherent ambivalence of the symbol, which has captured Philippe Jacq’s imagination. In the work at Casino Luxembourg, the proud cock transforms into a spring rider as commonly found on children’s playgrounds. Is the artist suggesting that the notion of national appurtenance is no more than a game – a mechanism whose impetus we merely follow? The three stuffed roosters hanging from the ceiling in the Project Room and slowly spinning around their own axis seem to corroborate this impression...
Philippe Jacq’s work at Casino Luxembourg – Forum for contemporary art is shown in the framework of Prix d’art Robert Schuman – Best of.
Opening oct.3 2008
Casino Luxembourg
41, rue Notre-Dame - Luxembourg