GALERIE LOEVENBRUCK

The title of this exhibition Our friend’s units with several other units is to be understood in terms of displacing units of measurement into a space that is affective. The elements in this exhibition are the marbled papers, using an ancient technique which produces a marbled effect by floating ink on water, and the mueslis, casts of a mixture of cereals, like a set of sculptures/lecterns. (...)

Michel: In your assemblages there is an effect of sedimentation. Each element takes on a form of memory, which is printed, engraved, applied, attached a charge that comes from another body.
Claude: We gave this research a meta-title, The Group and the Family, in reference to the sociological and psychoanalytic research of ‘‘French Theory’’ in the 1960s. The group is seen as an impersonal ensemble and the family as an affective ensemble.
M: A differential of proximity.
Patrice: What counts is setting up a relation between these two ensembles. For this exhibition we were thinking of a family of marbled papers and a group of mueslis. Regarding the marbled papers, they are fatty bodies placed on the water: it’s fluid, experimental. The chosen moment is printed on paper. We provide directions, but it’s very accidental.
C: The ancestral technique of making marbled papers is called ‘‘ebru’’, which is Persian for cloud. We wanted to do an exhibition about a collective headache, so that we could break down this psychological moment into several phases in the show: going from one drift to the next we eventually came to the
mueslis and marbled papers.
P: We were looking for a practice in which we could immerse us in something that escapes us, a kind of loss.
Jean-Paul and M: Loss in the psyche.
P: The marbled papers that we have chosen all have different atmospheres and harmonies. Some are very 18th century, others bring to mind CoBrA. We chose them so that they would form a family, with different psychologies.
M: We found different temporalities with a form of obsolescence, a bit as if the thing had already been consumed, had already, in a way, lost its effectiveness.
C: In any case, we are not looking for things that are exceptional or fabulous – on the contrary, they are elements of language that are common, already digested.
M: And in their juxtapositions, too.
C: It’s very chatty stuff.
JP : How did that paracetamol tablet get into the marbled papers?
M: It’s a shared object?
P: A biscuit.
C: A substance for curing a collective headache.
JP: You use the term “generic” a lot.
C: It’s everyday language.
JP: Not in art, after all, you are the only ones to use it to define it what you do. I spoke about your pieces as modernist postures.
M: Yes, I have the impression that your generation is very conscious of chronology, styles and periods?
JP: Recent generations unscrupulously use modern material. There was a time when such references weren’t emphasised. It was negative to re-target, but now the method is common.
M: It’s called «spolia».
JP: In what?
M: In architecture, an empire which destroys another empire but reuses a bit of an earlier temple, leaving parts visible, in order to affirm its conquest.
P: They were making false ruins as early as Roman times.

From a conversation between Claude, Michel François, Patrice Gaillard and Jean-Paul Jacquet, 24 March 2012.

GAILLARD & CLAUDE
Duo formed by Claude, born in 1975 and Patrice Gaillard, born in 1974. Live and work in Brussels, Belgium.

Loevenbruck gallery is pleased to present Morgane Tschiember solo show.