Text and letter working in the plastic space.
Alighiero Boetti + Liam Gillick + Jenny Holzer + Roni Horn + Joseph Kosuth + Jacques Villeglé
A proposition of Natalie Seroussi and Daniel Wust
Becoming largely autonomous since the second half of the twentieth century, through the successive contributions of various currents, including posters and first of all conceptual art, the letter and the text now assume the dual role of producing the work and to produce themselves. From there, the use of text in art became a double boom. On the one hand, an increasing variety of genres and on the other hand, a surprising abundance of formal solutions. The works in the exhibition were selected for these two qualities: the originality of formal solutions and the register of the text.
Each work in its own way is an important step in this open narrative that embraces a half century and testifies to the permanence of the challenge which consists into articulate the two main registers of representation, namely the text and the image. The history of avant-garde is marked by the presence of the letter and the text as another plastic space, indeed as the other side of the plastic space and as a source and marker of renewal.
But even more than the cross section in history, the exhibition would highlight the disturbing presence of the content. Whether it is poetic or political, whether it forms part of a register, private or public, or more particularly plastic, the text, once it gains its autonomy, provides a fabulous variety and something, by a form of infringement, that must be called: a Voice.
The exhibition will be followed by a second historical part forming the hypothesis of a memory component of contemporary works of Jean Crotti, Suzanne Duchamp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, etc..