FUGU
PALAIS DE TOKYO, PARIS, FRANCE
FEBRUARY 27, 2018 — MAY 20, 2013
For his first solo exhibition in Paris, François Curlet, an expert at détournement, reveals a
distanced worldview that challenges the clichés of the day. Advertising slogans, human
interest stories, or everyday objects give way to a subtle poetry, both existential and
demotic. Out of this arises a system built on paradoxes in which – like the Fugu fish so
highly valued in Japan – a delicious dish can become a deadly poison. The visitor fluctuates
between lighthearted intellectual pleasure and a latent seriousness that could manifest
itself at any moment.
«Fugu» presents at Palais de Tokyo an extensive selection of pieces from the period
between 1985 and 2013. Since the end of the 1980s, the artist has been developing a body
of work in which the material world is dismantled, disturbed, and distorted through the
poetry of the day to day. By having recourse to the artifact as much as to philosophy, the
artist is developing a strategy in which free associations are transformed into allegories,
and the mind is seized by surprising dialogs of forms that set the power of imagination
in motion and permanently reinvent our natural and material environment. From the
existential to the trivial, François Curlet’s fields of interest seem to have no limits, no one
territory. Encouraging critical thinking, his work is open to reinvention and surprise, using a
vocabulary as close to joyful skepticism as it is to cynical laughter.
Atomic as it is, his work does not obey any algorithm, and each piece seems to proceed
from its own theorem instead, while François Curlet searches within each object for its
possible «radioactive» qualities. Micro-history,human interest stories, historic events,
political news, advertising slogans, social anecdotes, derivative work, and puns are fertile
ground for the artist’s work. Hallucinatory vision of things, the work of François Curlet
cultivates such borderline states, where the object fluctuates between many fictions and
realities, pleasure and poison, just like the eponymous fish, “Fugu”. In the wake of artists
such as Erik Satie, George Brecht, Jef Geys, John Knight or the film Mon oncle d’Amérique
(1979) by Alain Resnais, François Curlet creates a universe in which humor is also used to
unravel social protocol.
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© André Morin