The Beautiful Absentee/ presents :
“Where, remarkably, nothing continues.”
Robert Musil
This title appeared to me while I was scraping off several layers of old paint. I was momentarily arrested in my progress by the wiki of the missing and beautiful Oulipo.
However where the absent, beautiful Oulipo takes pleasure in adding constraints, The Beautiful Absentee/presents : attempts to reduce them, knowing from experience that there are already quite enough, and in this case it’s useless to say any more.
That’s why I took to scraping paint ; I was looking for a nice original Absentee that still holds the form of a sewing room. It can be used as a workroom, it can be useful to meet new people including artists, or even for some time travel in other places. Or perhaps live in an ideal present in which selection committees, commissions and commissioners, inspectors, juries, judges, and the Wise are notably… absent ?
“So,” you may say, “What does The Beautiful Absentee/presents :” ?
First there is the attempt to step out of bounds and avoid too many partisan, reductive definitions. Here there are no obligations: let the artists come who wish to, with or without art. We are not obliged to do anything ; this includes critical choice.
My workshop is a workroom where I yield my place without making a vacuum. I propose a framework, a space, a volume where the painter’s activity is visible yet in suspension. This creates an intimacy that is often missing in the standard exhibition space.
The Beautiful Absentee/presents : takes place one weekend every 3 months. It is devoted to receiving and accompanying that curious human being we call the artist: a mass of indescribable emotions, within whom they grow and flourish. Sometimes they mutate into words, forms or actions, in turn engendering new emotions in their audience. More often, though, they disappear without trace, forgotten so quickly so as to doubt they ever happened.
That is why, when an emotion suddenly takes shape, The Beautiful Absentee/presents : it in all its fragile ephemerality, providing the care needed to bring it to light.
The Beautiful Absentee/presents :
