Arthur Fouray: Atlas

1 Archives and montage

M and SCREEN make books from notes, images, signs and situations. A Painting on the Wall treats a website as an exhibition display; arthurfouray.systems lets the same material return in other arrangements. The archive is something I work with. A photograph can move from a book to a screen, from a work’s record to this plate, and acquire new neighbours. The quotations below describe two operations: retracing a body of work, and recomposing it through associations.

“Inspired by Duchamp’s La Boîte verte (1934) and conceived as a dynamic and interface-driven book, it traces, retraces and contextualises a singular body of work: the active archive of an entire production since the age of one, solo or in groups, as an artist or curator.”

— Chronology

“Images, words and references can be rearranged into changing connections, extending the archive into a form that can be handled and recomposed.”

— Chronology

2 Naming and signatures

My name moves between sound, colour and code. AHFR splits Arthur Fouray into Art Hur Fou Ray and gives the syllables colour values. #aaafff carries A and F inside a web colour; rt4a compresses the name into a code. In Barcode Signature ID, a vectorised signature occupies the eyes of a display face. I return to the signature as a sign that can identify, circulate, conceal or become an image in its own right.

“Décomposition des quatre syllabes de mon prénom et de mon nom de famille.”

— M

“As a signature, it embodies a paradox: simultaneously the mark of an artistic act and an impersonal symbol obscuring individual identity.”

— rt4a Index

3 Chromatic codes

A colour can be a value, a name, a material or a background. #aaafff holds my initials while its paint varies with material and light; #000fff gives chroma-key blue the proportions of film formats. Baby works with light tones, and Void Drawing also uses colour codes. In my recent paintings, a coloured ground meets a drawn image. These different uses let colour organise what appears, and how it is read.

“The aaafff paintings begin: a colour mixed by eye from a screen, out of neon pink, cobalt blue and titanium white, painted on blackout fabric stretched over or wrapped round a found object.”

— Chronology

4 History as organisation

Naming a period gives scattered works a place to gather. before ARTS and Pre-Natal organise earlier drawings, objects and experiments into bodies of work; Cartes-cartels returns the labels of 2012 to the present. A beginning is also an arrangement made afterwards. Dates, styles and ways of thinking provide different cuts through the same material. On arthurfouray.systems, I can go back to an early work from a recent one: the archive has several entrances, and a period need not close what it contains.

“The catalogue gives materials and dimensions to an early body of sculpture, painting and installation and returns it to the present as an archival form.”

— Chronology

5 Concealment and interfaces

The #aaafff paintings wrap objects whose names remain in the titles: an ashtray, a feather duster, a car. The Morel works and the book formats of my gouaches extend this question of an inside and an outside. A book can become an empty box; a surface can hold back what it suggests. I think of the interface as what connects two worlds. The screen stands between content and its receiver, as the painted covering stands between an object and the person looking at it.

“The title of each artwork pairs the series name, #aaafff, with the designation of the hidden object.”

— #aaafff

“On 24 October, during Caravan, I spoke at the Aargauer Kunsthaus with my former tutor Philippe Decrauzat and Katrin Weilenmann about the paintings as interfaces: a visible surface over an object concealed inside.”

— Chronology

6 Labels and classification

A label participates in a work: it gives a name, a date, a material, a place, sometimes a way to show it. In Playing Labels (Cartels à Jouer), the labels become cards that can be handled and played. P+ continues this interest in the information around an image. When I move a card, I move its classification and its possible relations too. A label can organise a collection, propose an exhibition or become the work’s form. Reading is already one of the actions the deck asks for.

“Playing Labels (Cartels à Jouer), a deck of 37 cards whose title plays on cartes à jouer (playing cards) and cartels (wall labels).”

— Chronology

“Labels and wall texts became part of the research.”

— Pre-Natal

7 The museum as a playground

The museum can be a playground for changing the conditions of an encounter. P+ I imagines a train arranged as a white cube and a museum in a refurbished cruise ship. For Caravan, red curtains covered the glass façade. The spaces of the museum become material: their thresholds, routes, supports and views can be rearranged. The Invention of Morel opens another possibility, a place in which an apparatus changes how reality is experienced. I bring that fictional space beside these proposed and realised displays.

“Obrist discovered Lassnig’s work as a child, when he acquired a postcard of one of her paintings and tucked it into his home-made ‘shoebox museum’.”

— Lassnig, LUMA Arles

“A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.”

— Beware of Curator (music)

8 Associative compositions

I work through associations: an image, a colour, a word or a title can bring another work into view. P+ makes this operation tangible, as cards that can form a project, a script or an exhibition. Free association in psychoanalysis offers a way to think about the paths between fragments, repetitions and displacements. In my recent paintings, a coloured ground and an image meet on one surface. Here the plate is an interface for that meeting; moving its elements changes what their association allows me to imagine.

“P+ is a game of associations, a corpus of possibilities in which prospects and projects can form storyboards, narratives, scripts, events and exhibitions.”

— P+

“In two words: Oblique Strategies, the cards of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.”

— P+

“I developed P+ as an associative system of physical and digital cards.”

— Chronology

9 Painting as an object

A bed base or a pillow is already an object with a use, a scale and a place in everyday life. The Lauren and Kasimir paintings take those things as their supports, bringing painting into the room and the relations between its objects. The Spectre text dates the series to 2013. Covering a support leaves its shape active; an image or colour is embedded in a thing rather than detached from it. Concealment, display and the interface return here as physical questions about how a painting occupies reality.

“The series began in 2013, when Arthur Fouray decided to stretch a canvas over the base of his bed.”

— Spectre

“Andy and Kasimir are the protagonists of the ‘canvas-objects’ series.”

— Spectre

10 Tags and circulation

A tag gives an image a route through other images. In Pierre Joseph’s exhibition at DOC! in 2018, searches for #potato connected photographs to a shared word, while starch connected film and the glue on the wall. I read this as a way of working inside a code and redirecting it. Tags and hashtags classify, circulate and recombine what they name. That operation also runs through my colour codes, signatures, titles and labels: a familiar sign can be used again, and its new setting changes what it does.

“One only needs to search for the hashtags ‘#potato’, ‘#potatoes’ (and all their variants, including in Esperanto)”

— Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

“From the starch that fixes the image on film to the starch glue binding the forty-five ‘endless photographs’ to the DOC wall.”

— Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

“Also a pleased victim of ‘Aura’s migration’”

— Pierre Joseph, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles

11 Projection and repetition

Polyvision is Abel Gance’s three-screen process for Napoléon (1927), and #000fff (polyvision) takes its name from it. The Morel works refer to Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, in which recorded actions return as a repeated reality. A projection makes something present on a surface while its apparatus can remain elsewhere. I connect it to the concealed object and the interface: an image reaches us through a support, a frame and a device that shapes the encounter.

“This piece, a mural bearing the intense hue of #aaafff, does not conceal but rather implies an object’s projection.”

— Spectre

“The painting made for it, 000fff (Polyvision) (Spectre), takes its name from Abel Gance’s three-screen process for Napoléon (1927)”

— Chronology

“Morel is a fictional character who invented a machine that records the actions of human beings and loops them, reproducing reality.”

— SCREEN

12 Fiction, myth and transformation

Monsters gathers mythological creatures; We Are the Extraterrestrials asks about ordinary life in space. Fiction, tales and the unknown give familiar things another setting. A creature, a planet or an invented machine can become a tool for looking at the known: a body, a home, a social order, a way of communicating. The questions in the songs stay small and practical. I bring them beside Morel’s repeated world and the futures of Foundation, as different ways an imaginary situation can return us to the present.

“For six minutes and twenty seconds the lyric names more than four hundred monsters from myth, folklore and fiction, from Tizheruk to Taniwha.”

— Monsters (music)

“Each verse asks ‘Isn’t it nice to…’: to live in a spaceship, to eat some stones, to take a bath on Neptune, to wear the rings of Uranus.”

— We Are the Extraterrestrials (music)

13 Making an archive live

An exhibition gives an archive a place, a sequence and a present audience. With Hans Ulrich Obrist I co-organised at LUMA Arles exhibitions drawn from his archives, including Édouard Glissant, Etel Adnan and Agnès Varda. Documents, images, works and conversations enter new relations when they are displayed together. The archive becomes something people can move through and reactivate. My exhibitions at DOC! and Silicon Malley also worked with encounters between artists and materials. I think of exhibition making as a way to let an archive live: each presentation opens another route through what it holds.

“In 1986, Obrist visited the studio of Peter Fischli & David Weiss in Zurich, on the eve of the production of their film Der Lauf der Dinge [The Way Things Go, 1987], featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects set in motion where one thing leads to another.”

— Glissant, LUMA Arles

“From this meeting onwards, he began visiting artists’ studios, travelling by night train, each encounter leading to another, each artist sending him to others.”

— Glissant, LUMA Arles

14 Display and museography

How a painting is hung changes the space between the work and its viewer. SCREEN begins with the question of hanging before picture rails. On Italian Museography returns to display through BBPR’s Castello Sforzesco in Milan. I set this beside Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio in Verona: another museum where the arrangement and supports of works matter. A mount, an interval, a route or a frame can act as an interface. Museography gives form to the encounter, and that form is part of what I study.

“For six months I wanted to discover a new arrangement: how were paintings hung, historically, before picture rails?”

— SCREEN

“That question remains unanswered.”

— SCREEN

15 Science fiction as an interface

The pink of these information pages refers to Philip K. Dick’s late VALIS trilogy: VALIS, The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. In VALIS, information arrives through pink light. Science fiction gives me an interface for interpreting the real: another system of knowledge can make the familiar strange. Foundation places Asimov’s fiction beside contemporary art foundations. I read these possible worlds as ways to ask how a present is organised, what it preserves and which futures it can make imaginable.

“Ecology, inclusion, technology: are these shared pursuits not strategies to preserve the Earth’s species, as psychohistory is a tool of preservation in Asimov’s saga? Do they not lay the ground for life on another planet, like Asimov’s plan to move a scientific elite to a remote planet to save a galaxy from barbarism (a questionable goal)?”

— Foundation

16 Images across media

An image moves between painting, record sleeve, thumbnail and screen. Four paintings return on rt4a releases: Beware of Curator, Accelerate, This Is Not a Tender World and Chiquito. A new title, scale or medium changes how the same image addresses its receiver. A sign can become a symbol, an illustration can become a cover, and a cover can send someone back to a work. In the Beware of Curator release, voices read Smithson’s Cultural Confinement. Image, language and sound carry material across the boundaries of a single work.

“The song takes elements from the theme of The Matrix and sets them over beats inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ (1998).”

— Chiquito

17 Typography and appropriation

A borrowed typeface or logo brings a recognisable form into another use. Museum uses Marvel; IDEA works with IKEA; Beware of Curator redirects a warning sign. Artarre borrows Art Basel’s Block typeface, M works through several typefaces, and SCREEN stretches Franklin Gothic. This continues across arthurfouray.systems: letters and signs give different bodies of work different forms. Typography carries an organisation’s voice, a memory or an instruction. Changing its wording or proportions lets that familiar form say something else.

“Museum (Fraser Official Welcome) puts the word ‘Museum’ in the Marvel logo; Beware of Curator takes the form of a warning sign.”

— Chronology

18 Communication and distance

CALL gathers songs around a word for telecommunication and the forms of love in their titles. A call joins people across a distance; it also makes that distance felt. Gustav Metzger’s telephone boxes, Matthieu Laurette’s phone expenses and Pierre Joseph’s circulating tagged images offer other routes through communication. A device, a bill or a hashtag can organise who reaches whom and what travels between them. I place these beside signatures and sleeves: the message has a material form, and its route can become part of the work.

“A word for telecommunication becomes, in these songs and their titles, the many forms of love.”

— CALL

“Cultivating mystery, Metzger used red telephone boxes as his means of communication.”

— Metzger, LUMA Arles

19 Language and objects

Words can be carved into clay, covered by glaze, named in a title or translated into an object. Feast and Hope were made in Granada and fired again in Arles; their lettering passes through that material change. In Welcome to the Art World, I draw a ceramic by Alfredo Aceto that I never received. Language can give an absent thing a place, as a title or a picture can propose possession. The objects of a + o - bring the vocabulary of music into this movement between words and things.

“I had the idea of painting it myself: in a way, to possess it.”

— Welcome to the Art World

20 Study and transmission

Study passes through exercises, conversations, exhibitions and works. In 2015 I showed in Life is a Bed of Roses, (un roman), curated by Stéphanie Moisdon, and took my Master in Fine Arts at ECAL. The works and the ways of thinking developed together. A format can carry that learning further: a book gathers material, a plate puts it beside other material, an instruction leaves someone else a way to act. P+ continues a method of making many possible projects. Transmission is also a change of hands, in which another person can interpret what has been passed on.

21 Instructions and scores

An instruction gives a work a possible action and leaves room for an interpretation. P+ I asks for drafts of ideas mixed together; the cards carry prospects that can be rearranged before they are realised. This belongs to a longer history than conceptual art. In 1920 Tzara gave a recipe for a Dada poem: cut up a newspaper article, shake the words in a bag, copy them out in the order they come. From Buenos Aires, Duchamp sent his sister Suzanne and Jean Crotti a wedding present as an instruction: hang a geometry book outside and let the weather take it apart. Moholy-Nagy said he ordered his enamel pictures of 1923 by telephone. The scores came after: George Brecht’s Water Yam (1963), which gives P+ VI its name; Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Alison Knowles’s Make a Salad, where an imagined or ordinary action becomes the work’s occasion; and Sol LeWitt, in 1967, putting the idea before its execution. I keep the rule and its possible uses together. The same question returns in labels, contracts and exhibition proposals: what can a few words set in motion?

“It is a toolbox, a database stemming from a theoretical strategy first meant for teaching: to sketch 100 projects a week.”

— P+

“Never produce a finished object or work; only write and imagine drafts of ideas, mixing them together.”

— P+ I

22 Institutions and their voices

Museums speak through names, logos, labels, displays and the roles they give people. Museum borrows Marvel’s language of exceptional figures; Beware of Curator turns the guardian of cultural heritage into a warning sign. I use these familiar forms to ask who authorises a voice, what an institution makes visible and how a work can redirect the language around it. Institutional critique enters the work through an image, a phrase or a performed role. The sign remains recognisable, while its use opens a question about the authority it carries.

“Marvel, on the face of it a product of popular culture, answers a primal human need: stories, heroes, figures larger than life who cross difficult moral ground and are supposed to rise above it.”

— Museum (Fraser Official Welcome)

23 Contracts and circulation

A contract can give a work an action, a recipient and a way to circulate. Matthieu Laurette’s two-line contracts allow expenses to be acquired; DEMANDS & SUPPLIES made that financial structure visible as an exhibition and an online shop. I connect this to instructions and scores: a small written form can organise a larger sequence of acts. A label describes a work, an instruction proposes what to do, and a contract addresses an exchange. The different forms let me look at what passes between an artist, a collector, an institution and a public.

“Matthieu Laurette is proposing since 2012, through a commercial arrangement, simple two-line contracts that allow his expenses to be acquired.”

— DEMANDS & SUPPLIES

“It presents a full financial disclosure of all costs and expenses incurred in the past eight years of Matthieu Laurette’s practice as an artist.”

— DEMANDS & SUPPLIES

24 Working together

Working together changes the authorship and the relations inside a work. For Greffes, Christophe de Rohan Chabot and I showed two #aaafff-covered boxes, each referring to the other as its twin. Tournures brought Grichka Commaret and Kim Farkas into one exhibition; a + o - was a shared artistic and curatorial practice with Nastassia Cougoulat Montel. A common format can hold distinct decisions. The work includes the tasks of arranging, discussing, showing and keeping things going, as well as the object or image that remains visible.

“I began a + o –, a collaborative artistic and curatorial practice with Nastassia Cougoulat Montel, active until 2015.”

— Chronology