Jean-Luc Moulène — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 19, 2016 → February 20, 2017

Galerie 3, Level 1

For the first time, the Centre Pompidou is devoting a monographic exhibition to Jean-Luc Moulène.

Invited to compose a retrospective of his work, the artist has chosen to present a “retrospective of protocols” in the form of a production programme comprised of around thirty new pieces — a manifesto based on his research.

Through these previously unseen works, the exhibition circuit invites viewers to grasp the richness and complexity, both abstract and physical, of the artist’s world. Jean-Luc Moulène seeks to “objectivise” the world through a variety of practices, forms, and subjects. His thinking is rooted in mathematics, particularly set theory, which can function as a metaphor for social space.

By using 3D-design techniques, he thus explores operations such as intersection, laterality, and cutting, in the tension between body and object. His works question the shared space, the form of this space, and its intersection with individual space.

While Moulène is largely known for his photography, his more recent, object-based work plays a central role today. The artist experiments meticulously with materials and employs industrial design technology to create works that must be pertinent above all. The works’ capacity to question depends on the state of tension, rather than resolution, that they offer. Here the objects “converse” less with the viewer than with other objects. The vast setting of the exhibition space can be likened to an urban environment with cars and buildings, and bodies walking around at its centre. These bodies have to find their place in the chaos of individual desires, politicalconstraints, and social conventions.

According to the exhibition curator Sophie Duplaix, “it’s a poetic act, in which art, science, and technology intertwine”.