Le bonheur de deviner peu à peu (‘The joy of guessing your way round’), seven works assembled as a puzzle: Eduardo Basualdo, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ilya Kabakov, ORLAN, Jean-Luc Parant, Mel Ramos, Tavares Strachan.
Eduardo Basualdo’s work was created in 2009 for Argentinian collectors Juan and Patricia Vergez. It was acquired by the macLYON after a journey round the world. It was made in the West and came to us from the East.
At Cai Guo-Qiang’s show Cultural Melting Bath in New York, visitors signed a contract before they were allowed to take a bath in the huge Jacuzzi. In Japan, they just queued up.In France nothing of that sort is possible.
Ilya Kabakov’s Le Navire was designed in the artist’s Moscow studio, which was reached by going through the space under the roof of the building. It was a long time before the opening of the iron curtain and the fall of the Berlin wall. The work was sent to the West by clandestine means, where it was constructed and acquired.
ORLAN’s installation relates one of her many metamorphoses, in which the scalpel is used to extend the boundaries of beauty.
Jean-Luc Parant decided that his Éboulement (‘Landslide’) would invade the Museum. Since 1991 he has kept adding to this unfinished work, even though it is listed on the Museum’s inventory.
The Galerie Hilger donates the works of Mel Ramos; the Museum exhibits them before accepting the donation.
Tavares Strachan works in collaboration with the Bahamas Space Center. Before leaving for outer space, he has realized two extremely fragile sculptures.
All these works are held in the collections of macLYON.
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Jules Huret’s famous literary survey Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire appeared in 1891. On the subject of form and content, he asked Stéphane Mallarmé about the supposed impenetrability of contemporary poetry. Mallarmé’s reply was the inspiration for the title of our exhibition – a possible reference to artistic modernity:
« To name the object is to destroy three-fourths of the enjoyment of the poem, the joy of guessing at it little by little: to suggest – that is the ideal. And symbolism lies in the accomplished use of that mystery: evoking an object by degrees in order to show a state of mind, or else, choosing an object and slowly disclosing the state of mind it implies by means of a series of decodings. » These few words of Mallarmé inspired us the title of the exhibition, as a possible reference to artistic modernity.
