Jordi Colomer
16 October 2004 – 16 January 2005
IAC – Institut d’Art Contemporain
11 rue Docteur Dolard
BP 3077 – 69605 Villeurbanne Cedex
t. 00 33 (0)4 78 03 47 02
f. 00 33 (0)4 78 03 47 09
Curator: Jean Louis Maubant
Though the Catalan artist Jordi Colomer is represented in the IAC-FRAC Rhone-Alpes collection by an important video installation, Eldorado, in general he is not yet very well known in France. The Institut d’Art Contemporain has therefore asked him to work on the hypothesis of a comprehensive utilisation of its exhibition spaces, as a way of going back over his career and elucidating the complexity and depth of his work.
From the works on paper – Doble seudonim (1992), for example, or Puca (1992) – to the sculptures – Frase (1989-1995), or Como en casa (1995) – and the multiple photographic works, this exhibition provides an opportunity to delve into an oeuvre that has always been marked by literary influences – one might think of Perec, but also Beckett, whom Jean-Pierre Rehm refers to in his excellent essay on Colomer.
As an open oeuvre in the best sense of the term, Colomer’s work blossoms in video form, and, far from turning its back on the qualities of the sensorial, it actually enriches them. This is a body of work which, as the exhibition demonstrates, is attentive to daily life in its sociological, psychological and philosophical aspects, but also in its aberrations, its incongruities and its oft-neglected self-evidences. The world of Perec merges into that of Bunuel, or that of Godard.
Such complicities, both internal and profound – but also those that exist between the artist and the curator – bring the Proustian characteristics of perception up to date, and make this exhibition both a moment of great pleasure and one of reunion, with an attitude that is deeply moral, but also amused and subtle.
In Puca, as in Simo and Anarchitekton, Jordi Colomer talks to us with a great deal of critical lucidity about life’s little nothings, but also the big questions of difference and unease, not forgetting architecture and the city.
16 October 2004 – 16 January 2005
Curator: Jean Louis Maubant
The exhibition will subsequently be moving to the Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid
