For his first solo exhibition in Paris, François Curlet, an expert at détournement, reveals a distanced worldview that challenges the clichés of the day. Advertising slogans, human interest stories, or everyday objects give way to a subtle poetry, both existential and demotic. Out of this arises a system built on paradoxes in which – like the Fugu fish so highly valued in Japan – a delicious dish can become a deadly poison. The visitor fluctuates between lighthearted intellectual pleasure and a latent seriousness that could manifest itself at any moment.
BETWEEN JOYFUL SKEPTICISM AND CYNICAL LAUGHTER
«Fugu,» a monographic exhibition devoted to the artist François Curlet (b. 1967, lives and works in Brussels), presents at the Palais de Tokyo an extensive selection of pieces from the period between 1985 and 2012. Since the end of the 1980s, the artist has been developing a body of work in which the material world is dismantled, disturbed, and distorted through the poetry of the day to day. By having recourse to the artifact as much as to philosophy, the artist is developing a strategy in which free associations are transformed into allegories, and the mind is seized by surprising dialogs of forms that set the power of imagination in motion and permanently reinvent our natural and material environment. From the existential to the trivial, François Curlet’s fields of interest seem to have no limits, no one territory. Encouraging critical thinking, his work is open to reinvention and surprise, using a vocabulary as close to joyful skepticism as it is to cynical laughter.
OBJECTS PUSHED TO THE BORDERLINE STATES
Atomic as it is, his work does not obey any algorithm, and each piece seems to proceed from its own theorem instead, while François Curlet searches within each object for its possible «radioactive» qualities. Micro-history, human interest stories, historic events, political news, advertising slogans, social anecdotes, derivative work, and puns are fertile ground for the artist’s work. Hallucinatory vision of things, the work of François Curlet cultivates such borderline states, where the object fluctuates between many fictions and realities, pleasure and poison, just like the eponymous fish, “Fugu”. In the wake of artists such as Erik Satie, George Brecht, Jef Geys, John Knight or the film Mon oncle d’Amérique (1979) by Alain Resnais, François Curlet creates a universe in which humor is also used to unravel social protocol.