Défense d’afficher

An
exhibition by Lieven De BOECK for MAISON GREGOIRE

Inline image 1

Curated by
Wivine de TRAUX and Emmanuel
LAMBION

Bn
PROJECTS-Maison Grégoire are very pleased to invite you to the exhibition Défense
d’afficher, specially
conceived by Lieven De BOECK for the space of maison Grégoire.

This could
be the story of a colour which did not exist, blue, the colour of void. The
French Michel Pastoureau, who has written an extensive essay on it, underlines
that in the antiquity there were no specific words to designate the hue we call
blue. In that time, blue (unlike black, red or yellow/gold) was perhaps lacking
a strong association with a given symbolic reality, just as there were no
corresponding natural pigment easily available for trade. But more essentially
maybe, the fact that the elements directly associated by our senses to our
perception of blue, [removed] air and water, turn out to be transparent must have
played a part in the lexical inexistence of the colour.

Things
began to change through contacts with the Celts, who traded a blue pigment
(woad) and used it extensively to dye their garments.

This trend
gained strength in the Middle Ages, all the more since blue began to be an
important colour in heraldry and religion (let one think of the Marian veil) to
ultimately be confirmed as one of the main and primary colours, which optical
science subsequently proved it to be.

This shift
in perception and representation of a given colour gives food to thought, by
underlining the supremacy of nominal and symbolic existence on sensorial and
physical perception.

In this
perspective, the choice of Lieven De Boeck for a blue theme in this show is far
from fortuitous. His work is a work which often revolves about ideas of
obliteration, disappearance, effacement, with, so far, an important percentage
of his works being, quite logically, white.

The title
of the exhibition, Défense d’afficher (id est no billposting) is the very message conveyed
by the blue neon sculpture hung in the dining room. As such, it confronts the
viewer with an intrinsic contradiction in terms.

Not far
from there, in a corner of the interior, the silent dia projection Image not
found quotes the
expression which appears on the omnipresent screens of our digital era when the
contents of a dvd or of a file cannot be read. The only twist is that here the
inscription is set against a natural deep blue background, actually a picture
of the sky taken by the artist in Los Angeles, this simple element equally
subverting the regular meaning of the signifier.

This
announcement of the non-apparition of an image or of a content leads us to Série bleue, the
small glass bricks which are scattered around the house and are modelled after
the well-known Danish playful bricks devised to stimulate children’s
imagination.

This recent
production, made on the occasion of a residency at CIRVA, Marseilles, brings to
the fore, if on a playful and standardised way, the very
idea of construction. In the present case, the inspirational model, that is to
say the image, which is normally presented on the cover of the boxes of the
actual real games, is absent.

There are
five series of five bricks each in different corners of the ground floor. Each
series encompasses (in different scales) the distinctive varieties of bricks
(1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 pegs) whereas the variation of scales correspond to the first
five numbers (1,1,2, 3, 5) of Fibonacci sequence. This famous mathematical
series lies behind the golden section, dear to many a humanist and architect,
from Leonardo da Vinci until the main exponents of modernist architecture, of
which Maison Grégoire is a good example.

Fibonacci
lies [removed] also at the base of Le Corbusier’s modulor, the Swiss architect also
believing that the harmonious proportions of an architecture should conform to
the ideal proportions of the human body as expressed in the golden section.

Upon
discovering that the playful bricks of the famous Danish firm were also built
following these proportions, De Boeck decided to implement the production of
his own bricks according to a similar pattern of expansion. Another meaningful
and symbolic choice he made was also to have them produced in a material which
is in direct contradiction wit their projected use: glass , a material which
expresses precariousness, fugacity, and is more associated with the risk of
breaking than with the idea of a permanent construction. By doing so, it is as
if Lieven De Boeck wanted to underline the utopian character of our aspiration
to build and represent the world in an ideal and normative way. This is enhanced
by the choice of presentation of the bricks, each of the 4 first series being
displayed on prints with background images directly evoking subjective and
relative identity signs or symbols (the iris of the artist’s eye, his
fingerprint, his signature, a washed-out Belgian flag).

Last but
not least, the work called The Blue Story has blue only in its title. These polystirene
panels are named after the eponymous texts of Holly Anderson, which are here
transcribed/transliterated in Lieven de Boeck’s personal alphabet, modelled and
adapted after typologies of spray fonts of New York graffiti.

We just
need to take the time to try and decipher these pictures, which, if not
vanishing or disappearing, are nevertheless filtered by the subjectivity of an
artist who constantly invites us, to reinvent our own norms.

E. L.

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