D’une chose, l’autre — Bertrand Grimont Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 18 → October 30, 2010

Of one thing, the other

Any piece shown here is novel, a recent work as they say, but at the same time it’s not new. This warning borders on the absurd, but it’s truly around the overpowering expectation of novelty and the paradoxical belief that what is new is necessarily original, that Jean-François Leroy has worked towards this exhibition. Resuming, the Module / Shelf has become XXX, reworked as it is now, the piece does not evoke anything from the initial reference to a table, but still mocks the mistake about it’s use value: it is now entirely dismantled and reorganized as an exhibition shelf on which are orderly stacked the available remaining components of the previous version. The use of raw materials extracted from yards sounds now as an invitation to resume the construction game.

Jean-François Leroy considers its pieces as much raw materials, in any case still usable, convertible, commutable. They are states, in the sense that we give to the trials that precede the form that the reproduction will freeze, or, more precisely, this moment in progress when the artwork is a given sample of a wide range of possibilities. Since there is no question here of amendment or improvement, on the contrary, these successive transformations sound as low blows to the claim of a final state. Each time, Jean-François Leroy deliberately insists on the denaturation of the earlier piece, just enough so that the modification deconstructs the lineage. This may result in medium variations — XXX, a scale 1 color photograph covering an entire wall section, replaces the warped venetian blind ’in situ’. It is also these combinatory or fragmenting games — an older installation is redistributed into three separated pieces, X, X and X, now autonomous, each rearranged. On one thing, the other, it’s precisely that: an infinite potential of connections and deviations, to better lose sight of these endpoints that are the model and the ideal.

To overhaul, continuously. Jean-François Leroy emphasizes the evolutive trend of its productions and this reinforces the very organic feel that this specific method of systematically arrange unlikely articulations for objects brings. In order to gain in motion, in order to break any unity, any continuity: deconstructing to undermine any stability. Overall, this work in progress approach is very close to the biological notion of the generative, here it is a power generation of sign and meaning. To each new retake, a new deal upsetting the previous one. XXX: A carpet rectangle, formerly used as a floor mat, stands as a totem now — and in between, the tilting brings trouble to the extraordinary stubbornness of things to remain in their state.

Jean-François Leroy’s work has this great quality to thwart the bad habit that, in art, is to always track polarity, that is to say, to nominate a Plus and Minus, in order to reduce all relations to binary oppositions, and thus compel towards hierarchy. Here, neither “high” or “low”, but rather, in the processing, a continual downgrading of materials, of uses, and therefore, of the systems of representation. And of course, since we cannot say that any of the works shown here has been completed, a final gameplay with the market value: for only the acquisition of a piece could guarantee that its form, from ephemeral, becomes fixed.