Comment dire ?

François Curlet’s work, as we were able to witness on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo (Fugu, 2013), is made up of both ambitious and disconcerting cinematographic projects and various objects (most often the fruit of distortions) which are no less perplexing. Because of the way it splices together realities which are a priori incompatible, his post-conceptual art seems to have landed here from somewhere else.

Drawing inspiration from Rorschach tests and cutting saloon doors in the form of symmetrical inkblots, for example, is to swing imagination and fantasy open onto ordinary drunkenness. On another wall, the logos of discount warehouse brands are used as motifs in relief sculpted into scrap wood. (Vintage Discounter, 2012). In this way, concrete art and conceptual art seem to join hands, defining an economy of art in crisis; the visual signs of dire poverty defining a series of artworks that are a little brut, a little pop. Cold or sardonic? In another part of the exhibition there is a poster from May of ’68 contesting the control exerted on television that an artist (Curlet or his double?) has shamelessly commandeered and stuck onto the cardboard box of a plasma screen (Placenta, 2012). Is it perhaps all about defining a new comfort of vision which would bring television audiences and art viewers together? Or rather to invite us to think about everything that can be recycled, using a selective sorting of ideas and attitudes?  Curlet’s art is a touch of Frenchiness and /or Belgitude that invites itself into critical art, a way to shave down the aura of artworks and thwart fascination. It’s also an oscillation between visual aphorisms and detachment. The very colourful neon piece, the Arte concettuale spaghetti appears not so much as a program or a tongue-in-cheek irony, but rather like a joyous figure of depletion or exhaustion.