Road Rage
Christophe Lemaitre among Mimosa Echard, Kim Farkas, Aurélien Mole

25.11—17.12.2017
Organised by Corentin Canesson, Arthur Fouray & Eva Vaslamatzi

DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/driver-angst-christophe-lemaitre/

Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu

As he told Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis (1870-1943) would rather succeed in painting ‘sky red’ pieces than painting ‘red skies’ over and over. That is how, in tune with modernity, the Nabi painter expressed his wish for a reversal of substance and quality. If a given thing, such as a dress, is regarded as substance (’a little more than something’) endowed with a quality as its color for instance (’a little less than something’), one must consider, conversely, that a blue dress is not a blue dress, but that the color blue may be “dress”: a substance-blue, one possible quality of which is to be “dress”. Maurice Denis’s brief remark elegantly spells out an important idea – one in which a large number of attributes of things do not derive from them but, on the contrary, precede and produce them. Locomotion is not an attribute of the dog, nor of man, quite the contrary. Locomotion is actually what has developed and expanded through a multitude of differentiated compositions – biped ones here, quadruped ones there – within the particular conditions of their environment. In other words, locomotion is a product of nature, hierarchically superior to the animal – a form of unlocated energy dissipation of the living, of which each animal is a varying qualitative expression. The question consists in choosing the degree of reality.

Acknowledgements: Garance Chabert, Arthur Fouray, Julien Jassaud, Alexis Tolmatchev, la Villa du Parc (Centre d’art contemporain)