Julien Nédélec — Les récits proches mentent — Florence Loewy — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 25 → June 29, 2013

We present Julien Nédélec’s first personal exhibition in Paris, in collaboration with the ACDC gallery.
Both protean and poetic, Julien Nédélec’s work ingeniously explores the fields of language, archiving and also classification. Enriched with references to art history, mathematics and literature, his work — the fruit of an inquisitive mind — ably navigates at the frontiers between different mediums. The artist surveys them, examines them and plays with them; such as when he explores the relationship between a unique work and the artist’s multiple.
The four pieces by Julien Nédélec are constructed around key elements and notions such as paper, compilation, archiving and the artist’s book.
The piece Retitrer (2012) is a collection of 34 photographs from the book Titrer, previously published by Zédélé. Adopting a model inspired by a list Richard Serra produced in 1967-1968, Julien Nédélec listed action verbs relevant to his own artistic approach, in particular his relationship with paper: tear, scratch, crease and cut. Becoming his working protocol, these actions were then realised and the results photographed and assembled in a work lying somewhere between photography book and sculpture. With Retitrer, Julien Nédélec upends logic by using an artist’s multiple as the framework for a unique work.
Le livre des très bas reliefs (2013) is presented as an archive of all the marks left on the walls of an exhibition space: the imprints of previous hangings were lifted and darkened with pencil on long lengths of paper, themselves cut and bound to form the 294 pages of a unique book.
The minimalist sculptural component entitled Module pour La conquête de l’espace (…)_ (2013) was conceived as a repository for an imagined reunion of the 50 produced copies of the book ‘La Conquête de l’Espace. Atlas à l’usage des artistes et des militaires’ by Marcel Broodthaers.
Lastly, a part of the set La mort du livre (2012) is exhibited. On dozens of A4 sheets of paper, Julien Nédékel has taken an inventory of each last word from his personal library. The terms, whose letters are cut out in the paper, appear delicately on the pages which are slightly detached from the wall.
The exhibition Les récits proches mentent is the opportunity to view a collection of works characteristic of Julien Nédélec’s approach: conceived with a great economy of means, each piece offers much to interpret.