“The thing is that an artist everyday takes the chance of going mad,because you find yourself in situations that are past the point of logic you understand.You have to readapt your own logic just to be able to communicate with somebody else.[…]Art is not about telling it is about showing.If you can place a piece of stone and a piece of wood,and you can put them in relation to the flow of Life,there is quiet a bit there for people to use to be ableto find their own relation to the world and their own place in the Sun.”— Interview of Lawrence Weiner by Jesper Bundgaard
for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2014
It is precisely within this tension between the concrete and the undefined that their strength lies. These works do not tell us what to think: they open cracks. They force us to rewire our mental circuits, to break out of habit and move beyond our logical frameworks — beyond our usual ways of relating to the world. In these works, ambiguity is not a flaw, but a fertile ground where new questions take root.
Lawrence Weiner, Keith Sonnier, François Morellet, Sol LeWitt, Charles de Meaux, and Philippe Decrauzat share this ambition: to shake our certainties in order to reveal new ways of existing and perceiving. Their works are not answers, but tools — philosophical, poetic, intellectual — that accompany and challenge the viewer in an exploration of their own thought. Through this engagement with logic, these artists remind us of the necessity of questioning and of the meaning that constitutes an object, a space, a situation.
Thus, the works are no longer presented as objects to be interpreted, but as devices for thought: they invite a continual rereading of the visible, of language, and of space. Through deliberately open forms, these artists — among the most important figures in this field — compel us to reconsider our points of reference, to reconfigure our understanding of the world, and perhaps, as Weiner once suggested, to glimpse a singular way of finding one’s place in the sun.
Pierre-Yves Martinez, curator