Introduction
Nathalie Ergino
(p. 6-7)
Fabricateurs d'espaces brings together eight artists at a specific point in
time, but with no historical perspective in mind: its primary aim is to
explore and test out an a priori different practice of sculpture.
Whatever the focus—ambient space wherever it may be, the interior
or the exterior of the exhibition, the depths of the earth or the cosmos—
what unifies these approaches in all the title's explicit multiplicity is an
uncompromising concern with space. That space which, permeates and
encompasses us entirely by virtue of the earth's spherical shape.
The term
fabricateurs (“makers”/”fabricators”) bulks out this seemingly
abstract dimension in the interests of interaction between materiality
and immateriality, gravity and weightlessness. There is, too, an undisguised
ambivalence in the term: “to fabricate” in the sense of creating works
of the mind, and of inventing illusion.
Here our
fabricateurs use space as an actual material, with the tangible
components—wood, metal, objects, etc.—becoming its tools, “drawing” it
as if it were contained by matter itself.
These three-dimensional works are neither installations nor arrangements
of readymades. The artists' willingness to speak of “sculpture”
enables them, despite the word's classical connotations, to break free of
their immediate heritage—that of the 1960s and 1970s. Reading
Michel Gauthier's historical outline, with its focus on the “spacious work” and
the “situated work”, we perceive that while the the fabricateurs' offerings
undeniably use a Conceptual—and sometimes Minimalist—vocabulary,
they are not directly concerned with the exhibition venue, its architectural
context or its neutral, white cube aspect.
Nonetheless, they do find inspiration in linking the spacious
approach of a Kaprow to the expansive, active, multi-directional stance of
a Pollock. A number actually head off outdoors, drawing on the notion of
“expanded sculpture” posited by Rosalind Kraus's analysis of Land Art
practices. We also sense here the loss of bearings deliberately induced by
the perceptual and immersive experiments of Gianni Colombo, Robert
Irwin,
Ann Veronica Janssens and others.
The
fabricateurs' aim is self-propulsion beyond all boundaries. As if
in quest of some kind of elsewhere, their tension-imbued works strive,
strain and push to the point of disintegration.
Hans Schabus urges us to scale the barrier of a physical and psychological
fence;
Vincent Lamouroux mentally projects himself
to the centre
of the Earth;
Michael Sailstorfer captures the depths and activities of a building while reaching out towards the cosmos; Jeppe Hein sets walls in
movement,
Guillaume Leblon goes through them; Björn Dalhem brings
in the unfeasible depiction of a black hole; and Evariste Richer probes the
unknown, the unrepresentable, as he looks beyond
The Parrot's Eye,
beyond the actuality of seeing.
While they can sometimes seem static and disembodied, the spaces
generated by the
fabricateurs are in fact perpetually in motion: from the
friction of
Sailstorfer's car tyre to the smoke filtering out from under
Leblon's walls, they deploy energy and power, behaving as if they were
active components of the universe.
Whence critic Nadine Descendre's question, “Why are so many
artists now bent on propelling their works into a stellar non-field
somewhere between entropy and black holes?” Are they, as Anne Bonnin
suggests, “out to conquer a living-space”?
Or are they trying to generate a different perception of an accelerating
world in which space and time become one, even as they proliferate
ad infinitum?
