Christophe Lemaitre & Aurélien Mole — Ronde sable — Florence Loewy — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 7 → 21, 2013

Entretien — Christophe Lemaitre Depuis quelques mois et jusqu’à l’automne 2015, Christophe Lemaitre est invité à partager la direction artistique du Cneai (Chatou). Intitulée La Monographie d’un centre d’art, la programmation curatoriale conçue par l’artiste, né en 1981, se développe au sein du centre d’art selon une temporalité et une occupation des espaces qui relèvent d’une réflexion sur la nature même de l’institution.

As an alternative to the prevailing institutional theory of the time — situating ourselves in the late 70s — the philosopher Jerrold Levinson proposes the idea of “generative context” in order to define what makes a work of art. Coldly, the chronological relationship between art objects circumscribes their domain of existence: what defines an object as work of art is its resemblance with objects already considered as such, or more precisely the similarity with those objects we look at in order to appreciate. These objects precede the artwork in a long narrative constituting art history.

The role of an exhibition might be then to experiment with and draw out new heredity, not so much in a predictable and linear manner — as the opening of this press release might suggest — but rather by constructing symbiotic relationships between complementary and synchronous objects.

Ronde sable is not a dual exhibition but from individual works develops a web of relationships between images and objects, at times co-existing through necessity and otherwise proceeding by causality. Whether it’s undoing the folding of one, or sanding the frame’s paint of another, the gestures and works realised by Aurélien Mole and Christophe Lemaitre prolong, correct and empirically confuse their sources. The exhibition accordingly provides the conditions for a relational tree-graph in progress, where painted paper sculptures are placed in rotation, where two works chose to occupy the same frame, and where knots made from household string, left suspended by the death of their creator, are reprised by photography.