There is something of a rite of passage about a first exhibition. What was shown there was like a “prom” party, a symbolic burial and coronation. It was a departure from one world, the world of studying, into another, the world of art. A table had been set up for the occasion, on which some very elaborate and colourful cocktails were piled up, as well as an abundance of sweets. The lines painted on the walls also evoked the vocabulary of the party (the streamers), as did the shapes on the floor, resembling oversized confetti, which could simultaneously refer to the rigorously horizontal pieces of a certain minimalist sculptor. The coloured lines of the mural can also be seen as a nod to Mannerism (“serpentine” lines were a feature of late Renaissance painting) and, indirectly, to the mannerism of today’s abstract art, which has also entered the era of its repetition and excess.

[…] Today, because it is also a history and not just a genre, because it has de facto become a set of images catalogued in books or any other medium, abstraction has, paradoxically, shifted into the register of imagery. Any shape –square, round, ellipse, rectangle, etc.– assembled together in a certain order, inevitably refers to a composition that preceded it. But abstraction has also become commonplace. It can be found on the walls (inside and outside) of buildings, on signage, in graphic design, space design, object design, on television sets. Abstraction has become secular.

Abstraction, as practiced by Tony, is indeed a form of realism. This mannerist and “realist” phase follows the heroic period of abstraction. This is not to say that it is any less worthy of interest, or any less worthy. Rather than talking about “post this” and “neo that”, with all the historicism that it implies, Tony suggests that we talk about the end of a “first episode”. He, of course, plays in the sequel. The analogy is all the more pertinent in this era of “B culture”, as John Armleder says, and of growing confusion between the worlds of art and entertainment.

Extracts from the text by Vincent Pécoil.