Trois fois rien

Nothing here is being added to the material world. The works in the collection of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap) brought together at the CN D proceed using sampling, framing, subtraction and combustion. They stand at the border of the tangible, the derisory and déjà-vu. Under glass, in the light, bulky refuse, press cuttings, trivia or promises.

Trois fois rien, or almost, are these distressing enumerations published by Claude Closky, the declarations subject to caution by Matthieu Laurette, Mario Garcia Torres and Ernest T., those anti-monuments by Luis Camnitzer, On Kawara, Jorge Pedro Núñez, herman de vries or Guillaume Leblon, those backward images by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann and Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza. Finally come the hypnotic documentation videos by Céline Duval, with an impulsion, a provocation perhaps: burn everything.

For there is nothing insignificant about these fragile existences. By using clichés, by indexing what is nameless, they reveal, on the quiet, the latent authoritarian set-ups that govern production in the world of art, as in advertising. In the same order of ideas, there are revealed beauties and fictions born from reservations and effacements. David Claerbout re-signs an Edenic Jungle Book, now cleansed of any human activity. Edith Dekyndt illumines a rug of dust for a thousand and one nights. To paraphrase Barthes, who paraphrased Jean de la Croix, “the night is dark”, but “it enlightens the night”. In front of the exhausted bodies united on a dance floor by Émilie Pitoiset, we whisper : Where Did our Love Go ?