Take it personal
Solo Show Victor Le Guennec with an invitation to Vincent Villain
15/11-25/11 – 2024
paratext
When Theodor W. Adorno wrote his reflections on a damaged life in “Minima Moralia”, he could not have foreseen how contemporary artists of our time would take on this condition.
The minimal beauty of ”Switching Figures” – where the rail out of Vaseline leads into nowhere and the window of an art building in transmission opens into the past – is another example of the idea that progress has nothing to do anymore with going forward. It leads to a tableau of minimal forms and switching figures, opening up to an unsecure future while freezing the moment.
The invitation of Vincent Villain is a very personal choice by Victor Le Guennec. Both together created with “Switching Figure” a beautiful waiting hall. Where you freeze the moment for a minute to reflect on what you got. The tiny sculptures made from plump – Le Guennec calls them “Women of Conversation” and says that they are setting the rhythm of the show – could also be associated with notes. Music notes without a sheet, hanging in the air, giving the idea of the etude – another impressive, nevertheless nonchalance form: This idea that we all need to try things out, to experiment, to play with – that this might be the only way to gain a new form of contemporary aesthetics in a world where the feeling of going nowhere gets stronger.
Vincent Villain used Marcel Duchamp’s concept of “Inframince” as an invitation to the viewer – to find this hardly graspable moment in all the layers, spaces and times in this photography. It is a look out of a metamorphosis into a kind of fictional landscape. In fact it is not a film set but a really existing archeological site around which the architect André Hermant build his iconic “Le Quadrilatère”, but it could also be another planet. It creates this moment of intermission where one is not sure anymore what to grasp – the black frame which signifies the architecture of the 1970s or the archaic nature of the old stones or the moment of in-between.
Where do you situate these moments of in-between, innovation or maybe even comical relief that one can also see in the correspondence to Le Guennec’s “Women in Conversation” to marbles of the Cycladic Aera? This correspondence between the marble rail that is not marble and women that are no women? The form of the sculpture that looks like marble gives way to this line of references, connection and allusions that might be characteristic of “Switching Figure”: The awareness of the facts that there are some things you cannot nail down. Where you must follow the line.
What is also very sympathetic is how Le Guennec works with contradictions in the works he shows – that the women are made from plump whereas the rails which are very often made out of steel are made out of Vaseline. This humorous aspect is also apparent in the sliding track or rail that you use for doors. If you have a straight line its very likely that your door opens smoothly, but if it is curved one like “Sliding Door track” (2024) it is not. Still, it is not impossible that it might work.
So “Switching Figures” is also about chances – that moments are not there forever but materiality can change – Vaseline, you form something out of a amorphous mass and then at the end of the show you put it back in a pot – that is nearly a correspondence to this new form of art – augmented art – where you scan things and then the sculpture appears in the room but at the end it is still in your phone.
I think “Switching Figure – this show which is at the end of One Minute Space year 2024 with the theme “Tectonic Shifts” shows that shifts, although there are big, they do not have necessarily be forever. Like “Shifting”, the show we did in the beginning of the year where we took over a work by the last show – a sculpture by Louis-Philippe Scoufaras – into the other show – it shows that things are in motion and changes can be quick, can be painful, but also can be re-changed at one point.
Nadja Geer