Claire Fontaine: Spring will be Silent

Confort Moderne is pleased to present an upcoming solo exhibition by Claire Fontaine strongly resonating with the current state of social unrest in France; a time of international migration of images that visit and haunt us yet leave us unable to understand them. Spring will be Silent is a journey through the tunnels dug by information in our mind where facts are seen as experiences lived by others, altered and ultimately inaccessible.

The exhibition title is taken from a flyer that circulated in Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD during the police siege of 2017. In a video found on the internet, a demonstrator shouted at the agents “Do you like children? Do you like birds? Soon, none will be left!” Silence is the result of productive desertification, of the multiplication of airports impacting flora and fauna, of the abandonment of the countryside where no more children are born and where intensive agriculture threatens the soil’s fertility.

Claire Fontaine has transformed the exhibition space by covering it with newspapers, giving it the look of a precarious space where works are in progess. Visitors and sculptures float on printed words increasingly lacking freedom of expression. Fractured images, views from broken telephone screens, show us mourning angels painted by Giotto, an image of planet earth becoming too hot, a biro drawing of Yemenite prisoners bearing witness to torture. Neon signs show sequences of vicious circles and double binds lifted from the seminal 1970 book by R. D. Laing, Knots such as: “I do it because it’s right/it’s right because I do it.”

A playful re-appropriation of art history is at work in the postcards offered to the public; iconic images are accompanied by texts altering their meaning. The tag #metoo superimposed on some of the most important nude paintings in modern art history, denounces the fake neutrality of the representation of women as objects (of desire) and calls into question the hierarchies of affect that structure us.

Claire Fontaine is a feminist conceptual artist founded in Paris in 2004. She currently lives
 and works in Palermo, Sicily. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a ready-made artist, and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Using neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of political impotency and the crisis of singularity that defines contemporary life and politics today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—deprived of her use value and replaceable—she draws a line of flight through what she calls human strike, a revolt that frees the whole subjectivity and not only its productive side. Claire Fontaine grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournéments, and various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

Curated by Sarina Basta.

Le Confort Moderne is an independent art and music center founded in 1985 in Poitiers, France. It celebrates an innovative and ambitious program of concerts, international exhibitions, and artistic explorations. Past and upcoming exhibitions include James Turrell, Tarek Lakhrissi, Emilie Pitoiset, Ana Vaz and Liz Magic Laser. Recently renovated, the Confort Moderne currently includes a concert hall, a state of the art sound system, a club, an exhibition space and an education gallery. Its also include a residency program, a restaurant, a bar, a record store, a fanzine library with silkscreen and printing facilities, music rehearsal studios, and a garden.