Adieu tristesse, désir, ennui, appétit, plaisir — La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 22 → April 19, 2014

Goodbye Sadness, Desire, Lassitude, Appetite, Pleasure is the follow-up to the exhibition whose near-identical title began with Hello, the two bookending a season devoted to ‘forms of affects’. The first of them brought together individual authorial stances in works giving access to a single subject through a (sometimes radically solipsistic) first-person discourse. In this new exhibition, by contrast, the artist involves other people, raising the issue of defining oneself in relation to others in terms of common and even provisionally shared affects.

The exhibition testifies to different styles of address, to the ways an artist transmits and receives, acts and reacts, with all the doubts, negotiations and renunciations — as well as the accelerations and shifts — associated with any collective exploration.

Founded on exchange, their artistic processes must necessarily be explained, but many of the exchanges are silent, hinging on gesture and subconscious languages which, while sometimes generating incomprehension, often ultimately turn out to be productive. This exhibition is devoted to artists who, once they open up their practice to others, control and let go at the same time; and for whom the artwork is the outcome of a process of negotiation, with all the indeterminacy this implies for better and for worse.