My artistic practice is structured around two major themes. I would like to say which of the two came first, but the exercise proves dizzying, since each is at once the cause and the consequence of the other—like the insoluble riddle of the chicken and the egg.
The first of these themes is the looping scheme, the paradoxical device mentioned in the introduction. Under its many guises—mise en abyme, recursion, impredicativity, self-reference, vicious (or virtuous) circles, feedback, reversed causality—it describes a movement in which every direction turns back on itself. It belongs to a logic of echo, where destination and path become indistinguishable, where beginning and end trade places. What matters is less the particular device than the vertigo it produces: a thought folding back on itself while still pressing forward, a circular trajectory whose very motion generates its meaning.
The second theme is a will to decompose art—more precisely, to bring into view my analysis and understanding of the field in which I act. I want this decomposition to take the form of multiple questions, often contradictory, at times even picaresque: what are its definitions, its identities, its values, its stagings, its modalities, its ends? So many questions which, far from settling anything, keep art within a fertile instability. To that intent I add a twofold method. Close up, I isolate materiality (supports, alloys, glues, pigments, films, tensions, wear): the object as physical and chemical fact, before any discourse. From a distance, I examine its definitions, identities, modes of presentation, addresses and purposes (institutional, social, symbolic). This double focus—microscope and wide shot—reveals art as a system: a set of technical decisions, conventions of visibility and contracts of reading which, together, produce what we call a “work”.
In a certain sense, my desire to decompose art has led me back to one of its simplest foundations: a work exists because it is seen. Coupling this with my taste for paradox, I wanted to test a fine line: to conceive works that do not summon the gaze, that stand on the verge of the unnoticed—sober, almost merged with their ground, sometimes so white they risk dissolving into it. The gesture is contradictory and deliberate: to draw attention through forms that seem not to seek it. The operation skirts a logical trap (one thinks of the barber’s paradox, a vernacular cousin of Russell’s logic): if the work succeeds in remaining discreet, does it not risk disappearing? If it captures the eye, has it not betrayed its project of discretion?
I do not turn this into a radicalism of insignificance. It is neither a matter of producing the “uninteresting” nor of elevating indifference into a goal. Rather, I work by economies: simplification of form, geometrisation, sparing means, a watchful proximity to the ground. Reduction becomes a strategy of intensity: by staying close to the ordinary, the work shifts the question of its visibility towards the conditions of that visibility.
The paradoxical recursion of the first theme is intrinsically inhabited by the second—by this intent to take art apart. In the field where I operate, art becomes both subject and object: my statement feeds on the very territory it examines. Chronologically, my wish to peel back art seems to have preceded my interest in paradoxical recursion, and may even have generated it. But the reverse is just as plausible: perhaps this liking for unfolding, analysis and understanding springs from an older, unconscious attachment to that circular dynamic in which every effect becomes a cause.
From egg to hen, from hen to egg, my work takes its stand in that paradoxical place where vertigo turns to exhilaration—where the loss of origins is no longer a fall, but a movement.
K.L.