Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux — Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
At Loevenbruck Gallery, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux plays with words the way others compose images: through bursts of intuition, driven by a playful impulse and the regressive pleasure of immediate sharing. Yet here, the fleeting moment stretches into duration. The joke becomes a legend — in the photographic sense — of a reality captured in its raw form. Without images, nothing touches everything.
Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux — C’est écrit dessus ! @ Loevenbruck Gallery from March 28 to May 31. Learn more In this exhibition space, the artist unfolds a series of aphorisms with the radical directness of a performative gesture. By setting aside, for the time of an act, the use of imagery, he invests the gallery with an unexpected composition where humor and gravity, lightness and seriousness intertwine. The result is a manifesto of irreverence — frontal, yet more fragile than it appears. From his hesitations, his doubts, and his choices, Labelle-Rojoux reveals part of his mind, highlighting the essential role of play in any artistic gesture.Just as letters connect, intimacy and invitation coexist in a proposal that, far from delivering proclamations, embraces the individual act to assemble a singular collective.
Accompanying the exhibition is a captivating conversation with Bernard Marcadé, which delves deeper into this practice and connects it to the rest of the artist’s work.
Though this verbal work may seem to run parallel to his visual practice, it mirrors it in many ways. It suspends habitual forms, disrupts automatic gestures, and reinvents a freer, more spontaneous relationship with art.
Behind the witticism, in the way common language and familiar expressions are turned on their heads, lies a fissure from which imagery can emerge. The word becomes polysemic; the punchline becomes a breath of liberated thought. The painted, exhibited letter becomes a tool for reflection and doubt. This evokes the very origin of these aphorisms, first conceived during a residency at the Abbaye d’Ardenne.
Then focused on the concept of time, this written form becomes a subtle manipulation, replacing narrative construction with the immediacy of a whole. Here, the phrase is the image — not simply because reality needs slogans, but because, in confronting us, the phrase achieves what the artist seeks: a “simultaneity between seeing and laughing.”
Through the spatial arrangement of these fragments — whether they stem from bursts of inspiration, laborious construction, or sudden epiphanies (and perhaps all of these at once) — emerges the mysterious spectacle of the hidden machine: the mind that generates it all. Without artifice, the word becomes a screen. It presents itself plainly, asserting its force and impact. Not taking oneself too seriously becomes a form of play — perhaps never more ethical than it is here — a statement that demands to be both read and seen.
