Vincent Mauger — Solutions techniques à des problèmes théoriques — Bertrand Grimont Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 10 → October 30, 2011

Is Vincent Mauger fascinated by our countryside’s most pastoral landscapes or by the latest digital technology’s shiny renderings? Is he some romantic figure whose works could be like skyview surveys and captures of the earth’ surface, or a geologist which thoroughly probes the smallest crack, the tiniest curvature of a landscape that he seems to be the only one able to tune the measuring instrument?

We think to have identified him as the required architect for his disproportionate project, able to colonize, to survey and to transform all the art dedicated spaces brought to him, but there he goes, producing an uncanny video, both funny and distanced from his own labour as artist-worker-engineer: he is as if surrounded by his own practice, perched on a table that he chain saws and of which just one leg is left, leaving the artist standing alone and alive in the midst of the wood cuttings.

Of course, those who follow him with know that he masters the art of answering in three dimensions the questions that he was not asked. And often with humour. Thus, following several hypotheses, we will process with pleasure the photograph of the artist’s tonsure which responds to Duchamp’s one from 1919, but this time it’s no longer a star but an “A” in a circle, the famous symbol of anarchy. Mauger the anarchist!

This picture is nevertheless significant, for several reasons, of what is brewing in the depths of the artist’s works, especially in his sculptures: always extremely attractive, they seem to be produced from the digital and scientific processes geared toward the representation of the world and the rendering of complex models. But Vincent Mauger “pieces” nevertheless still speak of the lack of laws, of rules, of certainties, and always show their fierce desire to escape representation. They are somewhat anarchically “themselves”, being their own necessity, it is then with a subtle interpretative slip that one must bring them closer to the mathematical models or other vector graphics software that they evoke. While it is inevitable to assume that the artist himself feels a certain fascination for these technologies, still, it is what he does — his physical involvement in particular, the necessity he feels to project his own body in them and to engage his own muscles in the effort to erect his pieces — that brings back each one of them to an almost traditional history of sculpture.

And it’s not the chosen materials that will say otherwise : Vincent Mauger strolls the DIY large stores with velvet gloves: he carves PVC blades, inox steel rods, aluminium plates or gutter pipes with an equal dexterity, he frees them from a sad practical fate, towards a quintessential life…

By finding “Technical solutions for theoretical problems”, and not the opposite, he has on us — what a privilege! — an unknown beforehand.