Michel Aubry / Rainier Lericolais / Richard Monnier — Eva Meyer Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 1 → June 18, 2011

In a simple and beautiful text, Richard Monnier has this to say about Chardin:

“Chardin shows a bubble still containing its water that reflects neither object nor window as convention wishes. (…), Chardin makes the concrete aspect appear, he shows the bubble just as it is being created. He observes it and has us observe that before contemplate the enchanting flight of the bubble, we are captivated by the uncertain control of its appearance’s conditions. He rivets our attention on the moment that precedes its completion to unveil its nature to us. In this way he points out that observation is the privileged passage to discover what innocence it can be the expression of.” ¹

He has this way of going outside conventions, of recognizing the crucial role of observation and indicating what was perhaps one of art’s great ambitions, finding a gesture and a viewpoint as close as possible to childhood, as far as possible from compromises, from effects. These three moments that Monnier recognizes in Chardin’s painting are also points of complicity with Michel Aubry and Rainier Lericolais. The game is the point of passage.

In Michel Aubry, the game calls on a written rule in the form of a “conversion table” that permits him to convey ², to metamorphose in space the living breath of the Sardinian master bell ringers and beyond turning a choice of objects into music. This “musicization” is made possible by the fact that these objects, as he says, “function well” and are already the subject of a score.

Rainier Lericolais also comes from the musical world. He can equally remove himself from it and produce objects that have no origin other than having been created “to see”. The game should be understood here as risk-taking. It concerns producing and observing what has just been produced. Nothing is fortuitous in this method but the result can be either short of or greater than expectations. The idea then is to not judge the result vis-à-vis an exterior expectation but to welcome it for what it is. The remarks that Derek Jarman puts in Wittgenstein’s mouth, in his film on the philosopher, resonate: “If we didn’t do idiotic things, nothing intelligent would be done.”

Richard Monnier has already defined how he practices sculpture, “especially focused at the end of the 1970s on mud pies, beads, toy balloons, cotton candy…” To the experimental game Rainier Lericolais is fond of, Michel Aubry’s focused view on the intrinsic quality of objects may be added. He pays special attention to production protocols. Here too, the result doesn’t matter, but the gesture and the conditions under which objects areproduced are the basis of what will become a system making it possible to obtain the work that, seen for itself, seems to come from elsewhere.

1 La bulle de savon, Richard Monnier, in Carnet de bord, Cirva, 1996

2 Le Joueur, Anne F. Garréta, Centre culturel français de Palerme et de Sicile, 1992