Back Room, 2009
Chipboard, lumber, sawdust, wood shavings, guinea pigs, photographs, photocopies
Circa : 500 x 500 cm

_Exhibition at Passerelle centre d’art Brest. Photo : DR_

Photo : DR

As for other recent works, I began with a handful of pictures that express the quest for an ideal or an absolute. I proceeded with the idea in mind that the only way to articulate the latent characteristics of these pictures was to decipher them with my hands and on impulse, to tackle them below the belt so to speak.
It is not so much a matter of providing answers, but rather of raising questions and triggering sensations, grasping the substance of what they depict, confronting spaces and beings by assuming various roles so as to multiply the viewpoints: architect, artist, animal and denizen so as to create a zone of open ended questioning capable of integrating contradictions.
The resulting space may be viewed as akin to a complex allowing for the simultaneous existence of different states of being, an architectonic fantasy that externalizes a psychic state and various moods.
The work posits several living spaces of different scales and dimensions for different life forms ( humans, bums, artists, architects, guinea pigs…).
The animals that inhabit this desert of sawdust and wood shavings (the byproduct of this providential architectural form) ignore this construction that looms over them. They cannot even use it, for guinea pigs are helplessly terrestrial without the slightest predisposition to climbing or leaping. They spend their days in fear, hidden from nosy visitors, save for a few quick outings to procure food and water.
If we are to judge by the results, their only consolation for inhabiting this desert of the real seems to be a good quick screw*.

*Two guinea pigs went in, six came out.

Excerpt from a text written after the exhibition of Back Room at Centre d’art Passerelle in Brest, April 2009 

**Another version of the work has been presented in Moscow.

Back Room**, 2009
Chipboard, lumber, sawdust, wood shavings, guinea pigs, photographs, photocopies
Circa 500 x 500 cm
Photo : DR

Exhibition at Transfer, Mars Gallery, Moscou.

Back Room is a work initially conceived for the Passerelle Art Center in Brest, France. I was curious to do something precisely in the one room at the very back of the center which was not used to exhibit works of art. While the title makes obvious reference to those hidden places where illegal or unauthorized transactions usually centered around things like money, sex or drugs take place, what is negotiated here is perhaps more evasive, less tangible, albeit just as vital. It has to do with the politics of existence as Kafka might have intended such a thing.

Back Room emerged as a process (thinking and going around in circles)
starting with two pictures that have haunted me for a long time and that appear in the work : the first shows Vladimir Tatline standing by his monument to the third international, the second shows Heinrich Anton Muller posing with one of his machines. Two visionary artists, spurred by some utopian quest, evolving in very different social contexts.

Back Room is as much a psychic construct as it is an architectural complex. In either case it is best viewed as a fable, with multiple entry points and open ended meaning. It examines the relations between beings high and low, humans and animals, planners and people, artists, and architects. Regarding the latter, one of the questions it asks might be “What to build, why and for whom?”.

Within this construction I have tried to articulate the contradictions inherent to a certain utopian impulse as it manifests itself through architecture…the gap that appears between the grandiose, idealized vision and its often more modest realization.

It seeks to draw no conclusion nor make judgements, but simply explore the conditions of existence for those beings caught in the grey zone between the promised ideal and its debased reality.

FF, Moscow, August 2009

Photo : DR