Duographie — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 28, 2017 → January 13, 2018

At first sight, Maurice Blaussyld and Samuel Richardot are such different artists that it is hard to understand what unites them. Let us say straight off: they both have a relationship with silence. Blaussyld’s is hieratic, while Richardot’s is colorful. When the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard asked me to bring them together in an exhibition, I imagined this Duographie as the meeting of two contrasting silences that would not have been expected to live side-by-side. Although this meeting is not a matter of chance, it is one of those revealing coincidences: as I spent time with both of them concomitantly, connections became apparent, revealing the possibility of a duography.

“There is no
such thing as silence. Something is al-
ways happening that makes a sound.
No one can have an idea
once he starts really listening.
It is very simple but extra-urgent.”

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, 1961, p. 191, Wesleyan University Press

———

Silence is always the silence of something, and it therefore always reflects a unique experience.

Clean shapes, neutral tones of grey, black and white: Blaussyld’s pieces (installations, sculptures, drawings) offer a lean, iterative, economical esthetic, the artist producing a limited body of work over the past 30 years. They assert themselves through their mutism. “Peinture Noire” (“Black Painting”), originally inspired by a dismantled acoustic speaker, is in reality an open-backed volume. With its two holes, it presents a kind of gaping: its A-shape is not alien to language. It also forms a grotesque face that evokes a totem, a mask, or a silent scream like Münch’s. “Peinture Noir” is not a title but a name; this is what the artist usually calls it. This designation, which creates uncertainty, reflects the paradoxical function of the work: at once sculpture and painting, or neither one nor the other. This name affiliates it with the Suprematist painting of Kazimir Malevitch, in search of a pure reality and a world without objects. “Peinture noire” is the apparition and eclipse of an object.