Table et Tableau featured in artviewer.net

The traces of an artworks coming into being and the formation of an artist's identity are taboo subjects. We prefer finality, as if we were dealing with a natural phenomenon, or the mystification of the work and personality, as if we were dealing with a supernatural phenomenon. So, we ignore the breadcrumbs and artefacts that would lead us back to where all of it came from. What's more, we have the good Renaissance tradition, which forbade revealing the secrets of the guild, or the modernist tradition, which placed the "genius" beyond the reach of the masses, and the viewer was expelled from the artist's laboratory. In the case of contemporary art, however, the viewer has a particularly pronounced role: a participating spectator in the work's completion, a voice in what the work comes to mean.

 

The current exhibition, Table et Tableau, does not oppose the tradition, nor does it aim to elegize contemporary art, but works its way to the middle, or towards an alternative, closer to the idea of play. The viewers find themselves in a new predicament, between altruism and egoism, between the blind loyalist and the renegade savior, from where they'll never assume the position of author or giver of meaning. All the viewer can do is put the pieces before them in order or disarray."