Paris. “Past the Point of Logic” is the title of the fourth exhibition at Le Clézio gallery since it opened last November. Curator Pierre-Yves Martinez explains that the title “is taken from a 2014 interview with Lawrence Weiner for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.” But the point in question is also a starting point and a culmination. It is the American artist (1942-2021), a leading figure in conceptual art, who opens the exhibition and occupies the entire ground floor with a text at the entrance, which, like a statement, presents the concept of the exhibition in the artist's recognizable typography. It is a kind of discourse on method that introduces Dirty Eyes, one of his rare films, screened only once at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011. A true highlight, it evokes a fantasized New York in a carefully staged setting, with country music pieces from his own band, of which he was the singer, and a rather good one at that. Between the sequences appear lines, phrases, and words that also appear in four beautiful large drawings, characteristic of his work, which have never been seen before.
The first floor has only a few works, six by five artists. But they are rare and of very high quality. They develop and embody the exhibition's guiding principle: to offer viewers not a particular message, but a tool for thought, a device for reflection. Thus, a magnificent painting by Philippe Decrauzat (born in 1974), composed of a gradient of gray squares fading into a monochrome white, responds to a painting (from 1972) by François Morellet (1926-2016) with its meshes and grids of black lines forming squares. The latter passes the baton to the horizontal lines of color, which, like waves, structure a gouache on paper by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) from 2003. This, in turn, dialogues with two digital lenticular photographs on Dibond by Charles de Meaux (born in 1967), which emerge and change depending on the viewer's movement. Created especially for the exhibition, they are a variation on the important video work Bestiaire that the artist produced for the Rennes metro tunnel in 2023. They evoke both cave art and the figure of the animal in art history, one depicting an owl that transforms into a dove and then a deer, and the second showing the transition from a rooster to a dog that reveals itself and evolves according to the position of the viewer. Their interplay of patterns, lines, and transparencies beautifully echoes that of an atypical relief painting by Keith Sonnier (1941-2020), Veiled File 1 (1968), at the end of the exhibition.
From €15,000 for each of Charles de Meaux's works to €320,000 for the entire collection of Lawrence Weiner's pieces, which the gallery would prefer not to separate, the prices are reasonable. And even if they are high for the latter, we must not forget his historical significance.