“The visual arts must allow the viewer to find what he or she wants, that is, what they bring themselves. Works of art are picnic areas, different things to different people, where we consume what we contribute ourselves”. *
François Morellet
Morellet likes Duchamp, and has quoted the older artist’s statement on many occasions: “it is the viewers who make the paintings”. Ma Galerie is offering about fifteen works chosen by the owners of four private collections to its viewers’ gaze. The collectors were given the initiative of making the selection and the viewers of finding the meaning in it, while Ma Galerie has remained within the limit of interaction assigned to itself since its inaugural exhibition, Vos chefs-d’œuvre in 2011.
The main focuses of François Morrelet’s work are here represented: line, weft, straight lines, neon tubes. The vertigo created by the translation of orthonormal marks Les 24 superpositions…1977, (Deux Double Trames de grillage, 1972), the interweaving of lines as far as planned imbalance (Trois Trames de tirets minces, 1977), the extreme exercise of the retina (Pi Rococo n° 21, 2005, Sans titre, 1968); each exhibited work is considered in a perceptive instability that is the inseparable rule of each of these “small systems”.
Morellet thus develops a cosmogony led, according to Arnaud Pierre, “from controllable elements by progressing according to a plan”. The cerebral automaton which the artist has become willingly vanishes before this cybernetic abstraction. The desire and subjectivity of the creator withdraws to leave room for an aesthetic of the binary (Tous les 15 cm, tous les 16 cm, 1974) and digitalization (2 trames 2°-88°, 1959-1969).
However, the systematic encoding does not cancel the humour that is present throughout François Morellet’s work. Humour in the titles, but also the works themselves. The artist’s love of word play is well known, as are his palindromes and spoonerisms, which confirm the liking for interfering hints as far as arithmetical logics. The viewer can thus wander towards poetry looking at the halos of blue argon of red neon used by Morellet to abolish the limits of the work’s frame.
Through the selection made by its collectors, Samuel Le Paire Fine Art wishes to impose perception on the works as much as they evade it.
* In F. Morellet, Mais comment taire mes commentaires, Paris, Les Editions Beaux-arts de Paris, 2011.
