Paraboles — De la rature et de quelques-uns de ses enjeux — MAC VAL Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 7 → April 30, 2023

Here, an ensemble of new acquisitions and older pieces engage in a dialogue on themes such as the image, writing, erasure and redaction.
With works by Raphaël Boccanfuso, Pierre Buraglio, IFP, Ange Leccia, Angelika Markul, Philippe Perrin, Chryssa Romanos, Thibault Scemama de Gialluly, Jacques Villeglé, Jean-Luc Vilmouth.

Parables: on erasure and some of its issues

It’s fairly easy to find a list of the main parables on your search engine. These edifying stories have their origins in the Gospels. They differ from myths in their moral purpose and have generated many subjects and motifs and inspired numerous artists. Nowadays, parables seem completely outdated and no one seems to bother with them much anymore. None of the artists in this show makes a clear claim to use them, and it is only the combination of the various works that might justify the reference to this rhetorical figure. The exhibition is organised around the work of Thibault Scemama de Gialluly. His way of intervening in images is similar to redacting (caviardage). This technique, which consists of crossing out a word or crossing out a shape so that both disappear under the ink or paint, or of simply tearing or scratching, brings into play the principles of description and speculation: guessing what is hidden or trying to reconstitute what has been covered up from what is still readable or visible. This process highlights the words or forms that are not covered and take the appearance of ruins. Caviardage is as much a poetic technique as a visual one and belongs to ‘the history of words in painting’ (Michel Butor) and in art more generally. Caviardage is part and parcel of the profanation of iconography that Thibault Scemama de Gialluly talks about, and makes interpretation imperative.

Whenever the question of redaction comes up at MAC VAL, Pierre Buraglio naturally springs to mind. For a very long time, this artist had been in the habit of crossing out appointments on his diaries once the deadline had passed. In 1982, aware of the plastic potential of such a process, he systematised it to the point of making it a kind of ‘visual tool’, almost as identifiable as Daniel Buren’s famous stripes or the kidney-bean form used by Claude Viallat. There are also ready-made or allographic caviardages: these are evoked by Jacques Villeglé’s torn, layered posters. They reinvest the randomness and poetry of peeling posters on walls, the shreds of which reactivate the impulse to decipher and interpret. Posters, maps, diaries, prescriptions, censored old books, and redacted letters are all remarkably suited to these cartographic and editorial fictions. One would have to be pretty sharp to find one from the list of authorised parables that is hidden by these artists of different generations who use the same technique. It may be that ‘Parables’ builds the edifying story of interpretation, of its injunction, in which the moral of a kind of recycling transforms rubbish into a rebus.