FRENCH LANGUAGE
"Great artists have chance in their talent and talent in their chance," wrote Victor Hugo.
From the mid-19th century to the present day, many artists have entrusted their talent to chance. Freeing themselves from the agreed rules of representation, they played with the idea of an opportunistic creation from which any determined result is excluded. Fortuitous, unexpected, coincidental, coincidental, surprising, random or inadvertent encounters then become the prime contractor.
Victor Hugo searches the afterlife in ink stains, Edgar Degas launches into the uncertainty of monotypes, André Breton and the surrealists play with the exquisite corpse, Man Ray captures an archaeological world in a layer of dust, Niki de Saint Phalle shoots with a rifle at plaster bathers filled with paint, Jacques Villeglé collects torn posters on city walls, César compresses rubbish, Arman makes garbage cans, Spoerri traps abandoned objects.
This catalogue lists about fifty "risky" devices experimented during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries by some eighty artists for whom "everything can become an opportunity for a verve consciousness capable of fertilising chance" (Vladimir Jankélévitch).
Exhibition, Centre de le Vieille Charité, Marseille from October 21, 2019 to January 31, 2020
French language
384 pages / 250 illustrations
Rmn-Grand Palais Publishing
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