Just by happenstance (presumably), there were three shows more or less side-by-side dealing with the same basic thematic.
At Arprim, Ann Karine Bourdeau Leduc’s Les ruines enfouies sont repérables par quelques détours archéologiques, and over at Circa, the paired exhibitions De l’écran à la pierre by Andrée-Anne Carrier and Une trace ineffaçable n’est pas une trace from Chloë Charce. All deal broadly with notions of archaeology, fossilization, and visual illusion.
To start with Leduc, there are obvious (deliberate or not) nods to cubist collage and to the reliefs of Arp, but, as it says in the accompanying text, the show is more concerned with cataloguing recent design fads.
The setup suggests a large-scale maquette, a kind of inflation of a cartoon depiction of an archaeological site complete with fake grass.
The entire “archaeology of the present” thing has a pedigree going back half a century and it has stuck around long enough that it is practically its own genre, usually being deployed as a means to analyse socio-political relations in ways that have to be textually rescued since they make no sense in display. (The greatness of archaeology, to grossly paraphrase Foucault, is the ruination of social representation.)
But here, and in a lot of recent examples I won’t delve into, it feels much more like the style-casting reports that one used to encounter in some of the more lowbrow fashion mags.
There is, as the title of Leduc’s show suggests, a basic ambiguity here about the materials and their destiny. Certainly, their destiny as art is to be this moment filled with the presence of architectural potentiality while offering no guide to its end.
As the accompanying text implies, what the show stresses is a conflation of archaeology and tromp l’oeil, surface and depth, and the mocking suggestion that the depths of history (architecture) are optical illusions, the byproducts of superimposed flat patterns.
If grids are common to the three shows, they are not those of architectural plans. Rather, they are more like the grids used by archaeologists when on a dig, which involves its own makeshift architecture of molds, lines, stakes and other means of articulating an implied structure that is long gone.
The graphic quality of such ghostly structures is being given accordingly, presenting its objects against vibrant grids or coating them in day-glo colours. Both Leduc and Carrier’s shows were quite keen on grids, using them in various fashions as means to filter and prop up materials.
These qualities are especially evident in Carrier’s show, which relies on 3D printing to create fossils, a ghost of the machine rendered in plastic forms and suspended in the white space of the gallery. In terms of display, it takes on the suggestiveness of WYSIWYG web design (design rather than code), its isolated objects painted over to suit a predetermined scheme and be slotted into place, or arranged to suggest a deconstructed animation.
In exhibition terms, this feels much less haunted than playful, a theatricalized re-interpretation of banal objects that seem to have been left far below water for years to emerge encrusted with the life that has passed through their environment.
Architecture in much of this work is largely about its motifs and decorative aspects, and less about habitable structures than flattening them out, rendering them as burlesques on their shapely possibilities or their potential constructions.
This is nowhere more obvious than in Chloë Charce’s work [We have encountered her work earlier.]
There is little of Minimalism’s immediacy in any of this. While there may be little to understand conceptually, there is a prolonged, gradual, and only very vaguely directed relationship with these works. They tend to grow in how long one endures them. And they tend to be suggestive less of a glancing and passing encounter, than of craft tables.